The State - News from Aug. 24, 1987

Hollister police arrested five suspects accused of burglarizing the home of a vacationing black resident, scrawling racial epitaphs on his walls and “murdering” a doll. Police said homeowner Willie Anderson returned from a recent trip to find his house robbed and ransacked with hate messages painted on the walls and his daughter’s cabbage patch doll symbolically lynched and stabbed with a butcher knife. Anderson’s 14-year-old next-door neighbor and another teen-ager were among the suspects, police said. However, authorities reported that theft, not racism, was the probable motive because only one of the five suspects was responsible for the racial slurs.