Racist Slogans Blanket School : Hate crimes: Swastikas and skinhead slogans cover portions of Trabuco Hills High. The principal calls it a ‘shock.’

Swastikas and skinhead-gang slogans were found spray-painted over portions of the Trabuco Hills High School campus Monday, prompting an Orange County Sheriff’s Department hate crime investigation.

The foot-high, blue and green “White Power” symbols were painted late Sunday on buildings, doors and windows in about 30 places on the campus, said school officials. Slogans proclaiming “Skins” and “Thank God I’m White” were mingled with the swastikas.

School officials offered a $500 reward to students for information about the vandals and brought in maintenance crews from throughout the Saddleback Valley Unified School District to sandblast away the graffiti. By midday, it had been mostly removed.

Principal William Brand called the vandalism “a shock. It’s like somebody doing it to your home.” He also spoke to students over the public address system, whom he described later “as outraged.”

Rusty Kennedy, the county’s top human rights official, said the defacing of several public and private buildings in the past two weeks with “White Power” slogans could be linked with public attention to the campaign of former KKK leader David Duke for governor of Louisiana.

Much of the graffiti at Trabuco Hills high included the initials “WRG” or “Rascals,” which sheriff’s investigators indicated could be the name of a Whittier skinhead gang. However, Rod Bryant, an investigator with the Whittier police’s gang unit, said the names are unfamiliar to him.

Sheriff’s Department Lt. Robert Rivas said his investigators were pursuing “several possible leads” but had nothing conclusive.

At an early-morning break, some students watched as maintenance workers began to remove the graffiti. Elsewhere, slogans near a student snack booth had been partially covered by large sheets of white poster paper.

Staring at the racial messages, a number of students, both black and white, expressed their indignation, while others thought the graffiti was insignificant. There also were unconfirmed reports that some students had gone home to protest the vandalism.

“It’s a terrible thing what (the vandals) did,” said Chad Riley, a junior who is black. “But we’re going to keep on with our business here. If we don’t respond, we let them know how stupid they are.”

Harry Marshall, a sophomore who is also black, “was shocked” by the vandalism when he came to school Monday morning. “I wondered who did it and why. I’m mad and sick of people doing these things, but I feel sorry for them, too.”

Ken Wetzel, a white senior, said: “It’s a joke; I’ve seen worse where I used to live in Orange. I don’t think it is any big deal.”

Open for seven years, Trabuco Hills High School is almost 80% white and 3% black, with Latinos and Asians making up the rest of the student population in nearly equal numbers, school officials said.

Brand said some students gave police the names of possible culprits, but he added that no eyewitnesses had come forward. Neither Brand nor students could explain why their school was singled out.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to it at all,” Brand said.

The school is about 3 miles away from the Children’s Discovery Center preschool in Lake Forest, where in a similar incident on Nov. 6, swastikas and Ku Klux Klan initials were spray-painted on the outside walls of the day-care center, which is owned by a black woman.

Last week, the dorm room of a Latino freshman at UC Irvine was defaced with racial slogans. The woman and a black male student at the university have also been sent a series of threatening notes, school officials said.

Both incidents are being investigated as hate crimes; no arrests have been made in either case

Kennedy, director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said:

“Frankly, I believe it’s most likely related to heightened awareness in the county’s white-supremacist community of Duke’s candidacy. I’m troubled by it. We all should be troubled by it.”

South County communities have reacted with outrage to hate crimes over the past several months.

In Mission Viejo, the City Council formed an anti-hate crime task force last summer to express the city’s intolerance to crimes of prejudice after a string of violent racial incidents in the area.

Shortly after the Lake Forest preschool was defaced, the area chamber of commerce gathered several business and city leaders at a press conference to denounce anti-ethnic displays.

“There’s no doubt about our intolerance (to racial incidents) at Trabuco Hills today,” Brand said. “The students are very angry about what happened. They really reacted as a family today. Everyone pulled together.”