Swastikas and ‘Mengele’ sprayed on Marina District apartment

Several swastikas were spray-painted on an apartment complex in San Francisco’s Marina District. Several swastikas were spray-painted on an apartment complex in San Francisco’s Marina District. Photo: Michael Bodley / The Chronicle / Michael Bodley Photo: Michael Bodley / The Chronicle / Michael Bodley Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Swastikas and ‘Mengele’ sprayed on Marina District apartment 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

A series of swastikas and a reference to an infamous Nazi physician who tortured and experimented on Holocaust victims were spray painted on a garage door in San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood, police said Friday.

The vandalism outside the apartment building in the 1900 block of Jefferson Street, which was being investigated as a hate crime, was reported Friday, said Capt. John Jaimerena of the San Francisco Police Department’s Northern Division.

Citing the ongoing investigation, Jaimerena declined to say when investigators suspected the vandalism occurred or elaborate on possible suspects.

It was reported by a caller Friday, and police were combing the neighborhood for possible other instances, he said. They did not immediately find any.

“We take hate crimes very seriously,” Jaimerena said. “These types of crimes don’t target an individual. They rather target a whole community.”

In a post on the crowd-funding site Razoo, the woman who lives at the apartment who reported the graffiti to police, Ghazal Vaghedi, wrote that the display of racism took her to a “dark place” and “pierced a hole in my heart.”

Vaghedi wrote that at age 10, she emigrated with her family from Iran to Denver.

“The transition was not always easy,” she wrote, adding that adapting to a new language and other kids who weren’t always friendly was challenging.

Vaghedi went on to write that she eventually “adopted America as her own country.” She started the fundraiser to donate proceeds to the Southern Poverty Law Center, trying to get some good to come out of the vandalism, she said.

The page had exceeded its goal of $1,000 by late Friday afternoon.Vaghedi works for Razoo in community and business development.

“My goal was to ultimately channel the energy in a positive way as it is a painful incident for me personally, but also I wanted to address the larger issue of hate crimes occurring across the country and support a cause that works to that end,” Vaghedi said in an email.

Zack Bussin, 25, who lives on the same block on Jefferson Street, said he came home from work around 2 p.m. and paused when he spotted police clustered outside the apartment, then did a double-take when he saw what they were examining.

Along with the poorly drawn swastikas in green spray paint, the garage door read “Joe Mengele,” an apparent reference to Josef Mengele, the Nazi known as the “Angel of Death.”

At Auschwitz, Mengele was perhaps the most notorious of dozens of physicians who performed cruel medical experiments on their captive subjects, often maiming or killing them in the process.

Bussin, who is Jewish, said he’d never seen anything like it over the last two years living in the neighborhood — or in his lifetime living throughout the Bay Area.

Many in the neighborhood are assuming the vandalism is some sort of prank, especially given the sloppy handwriting, “but that’s besides the point,” he said, “because that just shouldn’t be done.”

“I never expected anything like this to ever happen around here,” Bussin said.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michael_bodley