Police are investigating after several cars in Queens were
found vandalized in what authorities are calling a possible hate crime. NY1's
Steve Kastenbaum filed the following report.
Police say at least 16 cars and one garage were covered in
graffiti. Some had swastikas painted on them. Others were marked by a circle
with a cross through it. The symbol of hate was spread out over several blocks
along Little Neck Parkway near the Nassau County border.
When Daljit Kaur woke up Friday morning, she found a
swastika on the side of her car.
"I was leaving early in the morning dropping my kids
off to the school. When I went to my vehicle, I saw a little symbol on my car.
I thought that it's just my car, but when I looked around, all the vehicles
around the block had it. So we called the cops early in the morning. They came
over, they checked everything," she said. "It's really disturbing.
I'm very upset about this."
Kaur said the neighborhood is a nice neighborhood and
nothing unusual ever happens there.
What's so puzzling to folks in the community is the
anti-Semitic symbol was spray-painted in an area that is not predominantly
Jewish.
"Everybody goes into the same stores, knows each other,
everybody on a first-name basis," said Blaise Christoforatos, a
neighborhood resident. "This is not somebody from the neighborhood, I
don't believe."
"It's racially mixed," said state Senator Tony
Avella of Queens. "It's South Asian, Catholic, Jewish. It's almost every
religious or racial community you could think of lives here, and they all get
along. So that's what's surprising, that something like this would happen in
this very quiet residential community."
Crime scene detectives poured over every inch of the nearby
streets looking for evidence that might lead to the person or people who
committed this hate crime. Because this area is so diverse, local residents
want to believe it was someone from outside the neighborhood.
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