Brett Alford-Jones saw the orange scrawl on the garage of the Pickering home where he lives with his husband Paul on Tuesday evening, after picking up their 5-year-old daughter from ballet practice.

A misspelled gay slur. Then “Time to move. 30 days.”

She didn’t see it, but the hate-filled threat has left the couple suddenly terrified about the safety of their daughter, their home and their community.

The threat is in the “30 days,” Paul said in an interview Wednesday, between speaking to police and arranging for a new security system.

“But you have to stand in the face of fear, right? If we don’t say something they are going to do this to other people,” he said. “You have to stand up and fight hate.”

Durham Regional Police are investigating the incident as a “possible hate crime.”

Spokesperson Const. George Tudos said the case will be assigned to investigators who will determine whether it is a hate-motivated crime based on information such as the perpetrator’s intention.

The police are not aware of any similar incidents and ask anyone with information contact the police non-emergency line, he said.

The graffiti in full says: “We Don’t Like fagot. Time to Move. 30 Days.”

The “we” is especially galling to Paul.

“It makes me feel like it’s the community that doesn’t want us here. But this is Canada and I have the right to live anywhere,” he said.

Paul says the officers who responded on Wednesday morning at around 8 a.m. were professional and concerned. However, he wonders why they were unable to respond earlier. Brett called the police non-emergency line immediately on Tuesday at 5:45 p.m. When Paul arrived home at 7 p.m., no officer had arrived and he was told when he called that the officer who had been on his way had been called off to an emergency.

By 11:30 p.m. no officer had come, and Paul said they tried to go to sleep. Having all the kitchen knives next to the bed did nothing to stop the nightmarish scenarios playing in his head.

Tudos said that he couldn’t say specifically why the call was not responded to sooner, but said it often depends on manpower available, the number of calls coming in and noted that Whitby had a busy night, which could have resulted in some Pickering officers being sent there.

He said Durham police take incidents targeting people based on sexual orientation or race very seriously and “will make sure we do a thorough investigation and find out who is responsible.”

The most obvious charge would be “wilful promotion of hatred,” said lawyer Gerald Chan, who is not involved in this case. “It is communicating statements other than in a private conversation that wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group.”

That charge requires specific permission from the Ministry of the Attorney General. The content of the graffiti could also be considered uttering threats, Chan said.

Chan said that while some cases involving hate-related charges are controversial or hard to prove because of concerns about free speech, this instance seems clear-cut.

“I think it’s a challenge of finding out who did this. But the words themselves and the context of the words makes it pretty clear that this is an act of hatred,” he said.

Paul and Brett, who have been married for 13 years, lived in downtown Toronto and in a small town before moving to Brett’s hometown of Pickering a year ago. Paul said they have never encountered anything even remotely like this before.

He is concerned about how they came to be targeted — there is no outward indication that a gay couple lives in the home, he said. And he can’t stop thinking about what will happen when the 30 days are up.

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“I want to spread awareness that this does happen,” he said. “Realistically this is why things like Pride still need to be around. People don’t think that this happens, especially in the GTA.”

Friends will help paint over the graffiti on Wednesday night, he said.

“A good response from the community would be that ‘we’ (in the graffiti) is not us.”