Three people have been arrested on charges of a hate crime for covering a small New York town with white supremacist pamphlets, officials said.
Police Chief T.J. Murray said in a Facebook statement on Monday that racist, anti-Semitic literature was abandoned at places including a synagogue in New York’s Southern Tier and a largely black church in Hornell.
The May 14 shooting that killed 10 black people at a supermarket in Buffalo about 70 miles away has underscored racist attitudes in the largely white Southern Tier area near the Pennsylvania border.
Authorities say the white gunman in the shooting fled his home in the South Tier village of Conklin in Buffalo.
At Hornell, the first flyer was found stuck at the door of Rehoboth Deliverance Ministries as people began arriving for services on Sunday morning, church member Marcena Harmonson told Hornell’s Evening Tribune. The flyer promoted the “Aryan National Army” and included a skull located inside a swastika.
Harmonson said church members were concerned, especially given the recent buffalo shooting.
“And when your kids, young people, are older people, they don’t know what to think,” she said. “Many of them have never experienced anything like this.”
Murray said officers found similar material in front of the temple Beth-el synagogue and in other places, including driveways, doors and a park.
Then on Monday, police saw two men distributing literature, officials said. After officers searched their home, two men and a woman were arrested on 115 counts, each of grievous assault, a felony hate crime. It was not clear whether he had lawyers who could comment on the allegations.
Media reports identified them as Aubrey Gradonetti, 31, Dylan Henry, 30, and Ryan Mulhollen, 27.
Mayor John Buckley called the racist flyers an aberration for the close-knit community. “These are three misguided men with hatred in their hearts,” Buckley told The New York Times. “It’s something that Hornell doesn’t reflect.”
