Three men charged with spreading racist hate propaganda.
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Eight days ago Sunday morning, believers found a leaflet with the symbol of a swastika in the middle of a skull and the words “Aryan National Army” at the entrance to the Rehoboth Deliverance Ministries church in Hornell, which is frequented by African Americans. The small town with 8,500 predominantly white residents is an hour’s drive south of Rochester on Lake Erie, in rural northwest New York State. The leaflet was seized by the police. In the hours that followed, this leaflet and others like it turned up all over Hornell, not least at the local synagogue, Temple Beth-El.
Officials immediately began an investigation and were able to arrest two men, 30-year-old Dylan Henry and 27-year-old Ryan Mulhollen, while distributing the pamphlets on Monday. Then her accomplice, 31-year-old Aubrey Dragonetti, was arrested. The police searched the homes of those arrested and found a total of 115 leaflets there. In the middle of the week, the public prosecutor’s office filed criminal charges against the trio for the distribution of hate writing in 115 cases – one for each pamphlet.
The affair has caused shock and fears beyond the locality. This comes against the background of a massacre by a local young white man in May at a supermarket in an African-American neighborhood of Buffalo, a little further from Hornell. The New York Times quotes members and representatives of Beth-El. The community of just a handful of families can’t believe that their idyllic small town has become the scene of racist incidents. However, in the last year, leaflets from Nazi groups have been appearing in large and small towns across the United States. The investigators have since found contacts with like-minded people across the country on the mobile phones and computers of the three people arrested in Hornell (Link).
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