MIDDLEBURG, Fla. – Neighbors in one Middleburg neighborhood are outraged that racist flyers that were placed on cars last week.
Residents said someone walked through part of the Whisper Creek neighborhood Tuesday night and placed the flyers on windshields. The fliers included swastikas and other white supremacy propaganda.
“Came back from being out of town and these fliers are sitting on our windshields and I think they were on the back end of our neighborhood," said one man who asked not to be identified. “It’s not terrifying but it’s sad that there’s people that hold on to beliefs like that.”
There was a phone number on the flier that was from an area code from Washington state. News4Jax called the number, which has been disconnected.
One resident recorded surveillance video of a man placing the flyers on cars about 10 p.m. Tuesday. The man in the video was wearing a hat and hard to identify but he is seen walking through a driveway and placing fliers on the three cars parked there.
“One of the cameras caught a big guy with tattoos placing them on cars," the first resident said. “To have a flyer placed on your car -- to wake up to that -- that’s sort of a scary thing."
The Clay County Sheriff’s Office was not aware of the flyers, saying they had not received any complaints. But upon learning of them, CCSO told News4Jax they started looking into it.
At about 8 p.m., the Sheriff’s Office sent a news release asking for residents of the Whisper Creek neighborhood to contact deputies if they received a flyer or have evidence of who may have distributed them.
A statement from Sheriff Michelle Cook reads:
“Let me be very clear...I condemn all acts of hate in all forms. It does not appear that the sheriff’s office was notified until this morning about flyers being distributed in the Whisper Creek neighborhood last week and possibly last night. Upon being notified today, CCSO deputies were sent to the neighborhood to investigate.”
In 2015, News4Jax documented flyers thrown onto properties in Jacksonville promoting the Ku Klux Klan. Since then there have been other cases like these where supremacist flyers have been distributed on people’s cars and in yards.