Racist Flyers Placed Inside Lockers at Burbank High

Burbank police on Friday were investigating the origin of anti-black and anti-female flyers discovered Thursday in several lockers at Burbank High School.

The flyers were placed in about 50 lockers at the school, which has a multicultural student enrollment, officials said.

The flyers, which featured crude drawings and writings, also listed several phone numbers that are apparently hot lines for the White Aryan Resistance and other white supremacist organizations, officials said. No organization is named on the flyers.

Principal Keiko Hentell said several students were upset over the flyers, which were apparently inserted through the vents of lockers after 3 p.m. Wednesday.

“We’re totally dumbfounded by this,” Hentell said. “We don’t know why we were singled out. But this appears to be an outside organization that is targeting students, trying to ferment problems and hostilities.”

Flyers turned in by students or collected by staffers were given to Burbank police.

Capt. Gordon Bowers said there did not seem to be “any rhyme or reason” why the flyers were placed in the lockers, since several students with ethnic backgrounds received them.

He added that distributing the flyers was not against the law. “It might be trespassing, but it’s not specifically against the law to hand this out, as despicable and awful as it might be,” Bowers said.

Hentell said school administrators offered counseling and assistance to students upset over the flyers.

One student, Bill Bushnell, 15, said he found one of the flyers in his locker. “I just threw it away,” he said. “I thought it was stupid. A lot of other people got them too, and threw them away or gave it to the principal.”

The incident marked at least the second time in two months that racist flyers have been found in a San Fernando Valley school.

Anti-Semitic and anti-black flyers were stuffed in about 150 lockers at Nobel Junior High School in Northridge on April 21. Those flyers were linked to the National Socialist White American Party, said Los Angeles Anti-Defamation League representatives.