Last month, a mural in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania featuring Civil Rights icon Cecil B. Moore was defaced with racist graffiti.
Local residents were outraged at the vandalism, which feature a racial slur. Chris Jackson, who lives in the neighborhood, said he was “baffled” by the crime.
“I don’t know why they did that right there, what they did is crazy,” he said.
Jackson, however, seemed suspicious of the vandalism from the beginning, saying “The timing, it’s Black History Month. It’s a nice, black area. It’s just not adding up.”
Police began investigating the crime, speaking to witnesses and searching through surveillance video, CB 3 reported. As the outlet reported on Friday, surveillance footage caught a suspect – a black man.
“The suspect is described as a black male, between 25 to 35 years of age, with a medium build. He was wearing a black jacket, gray sweatshirt, blue jeans, brown shoes and carrying a black duffel bag,” CBS3 reported.
The Blaze reported that the suspect was caught on camera spray painting slurs on the mural as well as the Brightside Academy and Habitat for Humanity. The incidents occurred between 6 and 7 a.m. on February 15.
MRCTV questioned why “a black man spray paint racial epithets towards other black people on a civil rights mural during Black History Month,” suggesting the suspect “either was trying to frame the people of another race of being racist towards black people or the suspect is just out of his mind.”
This is not the first time an alleged racial incident has turned out to be faked. As the Blaze reported, 58-year-old William Tucker was arrested back in 2017 for writing “Trump Rules” and “Black Bitch” on someone’s car and another person’s home.
Staging hate crimes is nothing new. The most famous current example is from ex-“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who claimed a year ago that he was returning to a friend’s apartment at around 2 a.m. on a frigid Chicago morning when he was attacked by two white men wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and inexplicably carrying a bottle of bleach and a noose. The men allegedly yelled homophobic and racial slurs as they beat him. Police later revealed that Smollett paid two Nigerian brothers to fake the attack wearing plain red hats.
In September 2019, an ex-NFL player allegedly staged a hate crime by trashing his own restaurant. Edawn Louis Coughman was caught spray painting his restaurant with racial slurs and ripping the TVs off the walls. A maintenance worker reported seeing someone burglarizing the restaurant and called the police. Nearby cops saw a vehicle matching the description of the one the maintenance worker reported and pulled over the driver – who turned out to be Coughman. The “stolen” TVs were in the back of his truck.
In November 2019, Syracuse University students protested over a series of alleged racist incidents on campus. One of those incidents claimed a student sent a racist manifesto to multiple students, but the incident never occurred. Police couldn’t find anyone who received the manifesto and considered it to be merely a hoax rumor.