Updated 3:05 p.m. on Feb. 1, 2018

A member of Oregon State University's student government now faces felony charges for allegedly plastering racist bumper stickers on cars outside a Corvallis food co-op last year.

Court records show Andrew Oswalt was indicted Tuesday in Benton County on four criminal counts, including two counts of intimidation, a hate crime under Oregon statute. The 27-year-old was arrested and jailed the same day in lieu of $157,000 bail, records show.

That bail was raised to $250,000 Wednesday, court documents show. Oswalt pleaded not guilty to all charges, which also include two counts of criminal mischief, during a court appearance Thursday. He remains in custody.

Should he post bail, Oswalt will be barred from the OSU campus or any contact with members of the Corvallis chapter of Showing Up For Racial Justice, or SURJ, as a condition of his release, records show. He will also have to surrender four firearms police found in his home.

"This is a hate crime inspired by ignorance, fueled by racism and aimed at people of color," Ryan Joslin, a deputy district attorney for Benton County, told The Oregonian/OregonLive. "It was his intent to terrorize both individuals and a group of people."

Oswalt, a chemistry doctoral student, sparked an uproar on the state's largest campus last week after he outlined some of his inflammatory views about minorities and women in a student newspaper article.

Corvallis police also arrested him last week on suspicion of criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, for the bumper sticker incident, which occurred off campus last June.

He was released the same day.

According to police, Oswalt and another person placed the bumper stickers, which contained a racist slur for African Americans, on two cars belonging to social activists parked outside the First Alternative Natural Foods Co-Op.

The bumper stickers covered messages on the cars that supported immigrants and refugees, said Faith Reidenbach, co-founder of the Corvallis chapter of Showing up for Racial Justice. The group is designed to mobilize white people to support people of color and take action on a wide range of social justice issues.

An employee discovered that someone also had placed anti-Semitic leaflets on the windshields of every car in the staff parking lot at the same time, said Cindee Lolik, co-op general manager.

Days after his initial arrest, an anti-fascist website published photos of Oswalt giving Nazi salutes from a highway overpass; carrying a flag with a swastika on Holocaust Remembrance Day outside the home of a man who advocates the extermination of Jews, and; marching with white nationalists at a rally in Portland last April.

In an email response for comment, Oswalt did not dispute the photos.

Police records indicate that Oswalt didn't keep his activities confined to Corvallis or Portland.

Last July, Oswalt and three reputed white nationalists were stopped by officers on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene late at night, according to a UO police report. The four men had staplers, a ladder and fliers with Ku Klux Klan propaganda and others saying, "diversity means fewer white people" or other slogans.

Several of the fliers promoted the Daily Stormer, a notorious neo-Nazi website. Oswalt wore a mask and the other two had scarves shielding their faces, the report said.

Oswalt was arrested that Saturday evening in Eugene on a concealed weapons charge in connection to a stiletto knife that he allegedly carried. A jury in Eugene Municipal court found him not guilty in October.

In another OSU controversy, a recently released police affidavit states Oswalt was the one who put up a Confederate flag hanging in a window across the street from the black cultural center in Corvallis, prompting condemnation from city and university leaders.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

skavanaugh@oregonian.com

503-294-7632 || @shanedkavanaugh