Nick Dugas left work at Paradise Valley Mall at 1:30 on a recent Saturday afternoon and noticed his SUV listing to the left.

“That doesn’t seem right,” he thought. Dugas saw that his front left tire was flat and groaned.

He needed to get his son to his math tutor. His mother was visiting from Seattle for her birthday.

Looking closer, Dugas saw a clean 3-inch slit through the neck of the Michelin man. His tire had been cut.

Dugas works as a retail security manager, so he went back into the mall to look at surveillance footage of the parking lot.

At 12:40 p.m., a car parked next to his SUV. Four women got out. Two of them peered into his vehicle — where there was a red "Make America Great Again" hat on the console.

The women went into a store, reappeared seven minutes later and got into their car. But a minute later, the driver and front passenger got out again.

The driver squatted next to his tire. The front passenger stood next to her, scanning the parking lot.

The left side of Dugas’ SUV dropped. The women got back into their car and drove away.

Dugas couldn’t believe it.

He looked closer and noticed the driver had a red beverage from Dutch Bros. Coffee in her hand.

“I just started picking the pieces apart,” he said. It’s what he does for a living.

Dugas walked across the street to the Dutch Bros. Coffee and asked about the distinctive drink. It turned out the manager knew the women; they came in often.

Dugas checked the coffee place’s page on Instagram, scrolled through the followers and recognized the women from the surveillance video.

He turned over their names and surveillance video to Phoenix police.

The time it took to get a ride from the mall to the tire shop, pay $300 to have the tire replaced and get across Phoenix, a 45-minute drive in traffic, meant Dugas missed his mother’s birthday dinner.

But it was about more than that.

The driver was 18. She admitted to police that she cut the tire. “She later told police that it was because she saw a hat with a political message inside the vehicle which she disagreed with,” spokesman Sgt. Vincent Lewis said in an email.

She was cited for criminal damage, a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by up to four months in jail and a $750 fine.

Lewis did not release the woman’s name, because she was not booked, he said. I looked up the record online for the case I believe is hers. The woman is scheduled to appear in court later this month. I contacted her for more on her side of the story. I hadn't heard back from her as of Tuesday night.

“No one has a right to destroy property because they don’t agree with someone else,” Dugas said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine being the victim of pure hate because of my belief.”

I wrote about Dugas last year when he adopted a homeless teenage boy he had discovered sleeping behind one of the retail stores where he worked.

Dugas would like to forgive the woman.

In a statement to the court, Dugas wrote, “In this case, the right thing to do is to forgive you rather than spill hatred onto you like you did to me. Rather than wish upon you the same fear you wished upon me that day. But I really hope that you are listening. Just because I have a different yet equally as important view as you do, it doesn’t EVER give you the right to spew hate, cause fear, and interrupt someone else’s life."

The next time Dugas got into his SUV with his 15-year-old son, he pointed to the red MAGA hat still on the console.

“See that hat? It hasn’t moved, has it?” he asked his son. The teen shook his head.

“You don’t ever let anybody change who you are, or what you believe in,” Dugas told him. “You stand strong.”

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @KarinaBland.

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