Interracial couple targeted with swastikas and 'white power' graffiti

When Joe and Pat Jude returned to their Cincinnati, Ohio home after spending Thanksgiving out of town, they discovered it had been destroyed and covered in racist graffiti. Concrete had been poured down the drains. Their refrigerator had been stolen. The walls were covered in swastikas and graffiti promoting “white power.”

“We had wanted to move to that home in a few years but this situation hurts so much I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do so without remembering the hate that was brought into our home,” the couple wrote about the home, which was a rental, on a GoFundMe page. At the time of this posted, they had raised around $7,000 more than the original funding goal of $2,000.

In 2010, the Judes lost their biracial son to suicide. “He was treated racist because he was a mixed young man,” the GoFundMe page reads. “People would call him the N-word and stupid. Unfortunately, with all of this negativity, we lost a wonderful young man.”

In a statement, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said, “I am deeply disturbed by the act of hatred perpetrated against this family. This crime is not only an attack on an innocent family, it is an attack on our values. I have been in communication with the police and I know that they are aggressively working to bring the perpetrators of this hate crime to justice.”

This is just one of hundreds of reported hate crimes that have taken place in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. In a report released Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center found over 860 reported hate incidents since the election—the second-most common type of harassment has been anti-black.