The owner of an auto repair shop in Spring Lake, North Carolina, started seeing racist messages painted on vehicles on his lot along with broken windows. Some of the messages referenced the Ku Klux Klan. Swastikas were also painted on some vehicle. One of the messages said: “please leave.”
The owner of the Auto Body and Repair shop, Dwayne Haynesworth, told WRAL last week that he doesn’t know why he was targeted.
“I mean I’m not bothering anybody. I’m just out here trying to do business. I don’t really know anybody out here,” he told the outlet.
Haynesworth has only been renting the property for two months and said the vandalism started shortly after he started renting — when one of the vehicles was stolen from the property.
“Spring Lake Police said they are taking the incident seriously and are stepping up patrols around the business,” WRAL reported initially.
Haynesworth installed video cameras to catch the vandals in the act and discovered that the criminals appeared to be black men, though WRAL didn’t mention their race in its follow-up report.
“Cameras were set up at the lot on Monday around 5 p.m. The security footage caught two men walking onto Haynesworth’s property from the highway that night,” the outlet reported. “The two men spent several minutes rummaging through vehicles, then smashing windows of cars that were already damaged.”
Police were reportedly unable to fingerprint any of the damaged vehicles because it required permission from the vehicle owners.
This is not a typical hoax story in which the alleged victim is actually the perpetrator, but it does show how criminals may use the media’s obsession with finding racism and hate crimes to cover their bad behavior.
The Blaze suggested, “One clue that might have tipped off the police to the incident being not a legitimate instance of white supremacy was that the swastika had one of the arms painted backwards.”
The incident follows a long line of hate crime allegations that turn out to be perpetrated by black people. One recent example comes from White Bear Lake High School South Campus in Minnesota, where black female students were invited into a group chat on Instagram where they were sent threatening and racist messages. Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest the messages, and messages of condemnation were sent by school administrators.
It turned out the group was created by a black female student who also appears to have sent the messages.
At Albion College in Michigan, outrageously racist graffiti messages with phrases like “white power” and “let’s kill all N*****s on campus,” which sparked days of protest at Albion College in Michigan, were actually written by a black student.
In November 2020, a black teenager painted racist messages on his own SUV in an apparent attempt to receive insurance money, The Daily Wire reported.