“Kill Whites” was spray-painted on a mural in the parking lot of a Seattle business and the owner is disgusted.

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“I am angered that some vandal would deface a prominent muralist’s artwork in order to make some idiotic statement that I suspect means nothing to anyone,” Uncle Ike’s owner Ian Eisenberg explained to me.

Early Sunday morning, around 3:30 a.m., a tagger defaced the artwork by local Joey Nix. The mural is painted on the back of the parking lot of Uncle Ike’s marijuana dispensary in Capitol Hill and a police patrol car was in the area shortly before the tagging. The incident was caught on surveillance video but the tagger was well covered, wearing what looks like an all-black outfit, including black pants, a black hoodie, and a black bandanna. While the tagger’s gender is unclear, the business owner believes the tagger might be white.

“It’s such a stupid statement I can’t read anything into it whatsoever,” Eisenberg fumed. “Whatever point the [tagger] was trying to make was lost in translation. There was a blank wall a few feet away. They should have tagged that and left Joey’s work alone. By wrecking Joey’s mural they lost whatever point they were trying to make. I suspect it was some dumb kid trying to score some points with whatever ridiculous crowd they hang with.”

The damage to the mural is extensive, with the phrase spread out in large block letters. The work took a few weeks to complete and it may be expensive to fix. Nix is expected to review the damage this week. In the meantime, the Seattle Police Department has been called.

Was Eisenberg the intended target or is this a random crime? Eisenberg tells me the marijuana store nearby suffered a broken window, but he’s been the target of hateful rhetoric in the past.

Eisenberg also owns a shop in the Central District, which has been the scene of several protests over concerns of gentrification. Earlier this year, Omari Tahir-Garrett, a CD activist, yelled at Eisenberg, a Jew, to “go back to Germany” in order to “let them Nazis get you again.”

On Facebook, several locals have celebrated the tagging, with one man reiterating the call to “KILL WHITES.”

Obviously, the statement is a hateful threat, but will the investigation be treated as a hate crime or bias incident?

I’ll update the story when the police department responds to my questions.