KUOW Employee Woke Up to Find Swastikas Painted on Her Cars, and Cars All Down the Block

Edmonds resident Bond Huberman and her husband found swastikas spray-painted on several cars on their street this morning. Bond Huberman

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Bond Huberman, social media producer at KUOW, woke up this morning to find that someone had spray-painted a swastika on her car. But it wasn't only her car. The Vanpool Community Transit car she drives and eight other cars on her block had swastikas on them too.

A ninth had been spray-painted with something different: "Trump."

Huberman, who lives in Edmonds, said she reported the vandalism to the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. The Stranger is still waiting to hear from the Sheriff's Office as to whether they're investigating the incident as a hate crime. Edmonds police also received reports of one block tagged with swastikas. Two victims had come forward to report swastikas drawn on their car, and another house had been tagged with swastikas on the windows.

The swastikas on the windows, Edmonds' police spokesman Sergeant Josh McClure said, weren't exactly accurate.

"I'd like to say the swastikas aren't very good," he said.

This isn't the first time that Americans with hard-ons for Trump or neo-Nazi imagery haven't been able to draw swastikas correctly. When Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn was defaced with pro-Trump swastikas last November, the squiggles looked... confused.

In March, however, Capitol Hill synagogue Temple de Hirsch Sinai was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti that read, "HOLOCAU$T I$ FAKE HI$TORY." In late February, two buildings in Ballard were vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti, too.

Huberman's car. Bond Huberman

But Edmonds police are not investigating the reports they received as hate crimes, McClure said.

"We are not investigating it as a hate crime, because it appears that someone went around and did this randomly to a bunch of people, not someone specifically targeted," McClure said. Instead, the incidents will likely be coded as felony malicious mischief, the fancy term for property damage.

Reached by phone this morning, Huberman said that she feels numb.

"I don't want to say that I'm surprised, because I know things like this happen everyday," she said. "But waking up to it felt... the world just feels like it's two clicks away from total chaos right now."

The Stranger is tracking hate crimes in Seattle and King County with the help of ProPublica and a tool called Documenting Hate. If you want to report a hate crime to us, click here.