GARLAND, Texas — The FBI and police are investigating hate speech flyers distributed across Garland and Colleyville over the weekend.
Skyler Ray first spotted them Saturday morning on a walk in Garland’s Spring Park neighborhood. He first thought the bagged-up flyers he kept seeing in every driveway were advertisements until he picked them up.
“I noticed the Star of David on it first,” he said. “They kind of outline a lot of the anti-Semitic stuff.”
The flyers he found in Garland contained anti-Semitic writings, links to a site with hate speech videos and they’re critical of the Biden administration. He picked the ones he saw and reported it to the police.
“This is just ugly and simple hate,” Anna Salton Eisen said.
Eisen is the founding president of Congregation Beth Israel. The congregation in Colleyville was recently attacked and had congregation members and its rabbi taken hostage.
Sunday morning, Colleyville police said resident in the city also found flyers at their homes and in their driveways that included white nationalist propaganda.
“Hopefully, they will find the people who are putting these out and they will be prosecuted,” Eisen said. “We have to address the hate where it begins, which is with words.”
The FBI said the effort appears coordinated with flyers showing up in San Francisco, Denver and Southern Florida and possibly other states as well.
Monday, while WFAA was speaking with Ray, he discovered new bags had been tossed out in the same area of Spring Park.
“It’s upsetting to find them again today,” he said.
Police picked up the new bags as evidence in the investigation. The FBI said while the flyers are clearly hate speech, they are not a hate crime. Police added, the bags were distributed randomly and not targeted, which a hate crime would need to be.
Law enforcement in both cities are investigating.
“I feel strong and resolute that this needs to be addressed,” said Eisen.
The charges though, would likely be enhanced versions of littering, trespassing or criminal mischief depending what detectives discover.
“It just takes one person reading this and kind of running with it to cause havoc and to really tear a community apart,” said Ray.