Elyria family wakes up to racist graffiti on car

ELYRIA — An Elyria family was shocked to wake up Thursday morning and find a vandal had smashed the pumpkins outside their home. But that wasn't all. After Heather Boone discovered what had been written on her car in marker, the Fairfield Estates resident said she was more saddened than anything. "My daughter, who is almost 17, I had to take her to school this morning," Boone said. "She found the swastika and the n-word on the front of my car and just started sobbing." The graffiti included multiple racist and anti-Semitic messages, such as the phrase "race traitor" and the swastika on the car's hood, and a crudely drawn Star of David on the driver's side door. Another vulgar message on the hood used the n-word. "Voting will not remove them" was scrawled on the sedan's trunk. None of the members of the family is Black or Jewish, so Boone suspects the vandal wrote the graffiti after seeing a flag hanging near the house that promoted peace and social justice issues. The smashed pumpkins were first noticed when Boone's daughter woke up for school. The family reviewed their home security camera footage, which caught the vandal on tape about 3 a.m. Thursday. On the video, the vandal is seen holding up a smartphone, apparently filming some of his actions. At one point, he shines a flashlight on the flag and later snatches it. Even after watching the footage, the family did not realize the full extent of the damage until walking outside. "Everywhere we looked, there was something else," Boone said. One of Boone's window screens was also slashed and it appears the vandal tried, unsuccessfully, to throw a pumpkin through the window. A neighbor also experienced vandalism but did not have graffiti. The neighbor did, however, capture a close-up image of the suspect's face on a home security camera. Elyria police investigated the incident but a report was not complete Thursday. The messages written in marker on the car were able to be cleaned off, but Boone said the memory will never go away — especially for her daughter, who had never been exposed so directly to something so overtly racist. "I was ashamed to live in a world like this, to be completely honest, where people are so hateful over something that people cannot help," she said. If the vandal is caught, Boone said she plans to press charges. Contact Dylan Reynolds at (440) 329-7123 or dreynolds@chroniclet.com. Follow him on Twitter @drey1357.