Days after the historic sanctuary at an Ocala church was destroyed by fire, the organization’s congregation has reported that the property was the subject of an act of racially-charged vandalism.
Leaders at St. Paul AME Church reported the unlawful entry and acts of vandalism on Tuesday night, hours after church officers arrived and discovered the grafiti.
According to a statement released by the church’s leadership, an unknown individual broke into the condemned structure and covered both the interior and exterior of the property with threatening language, hateful symbols, and overt racial slurs.
On the church’s exterior marquee sign, vandals wrote “Peckerwood Will Lick,” alongside a drawn handicap logo.
Inside the sanctuary, which has 30-foot ceilings and second-floor balconies that were heavily scorched over the weekend, vandals repeated the slurs, writing phrases like “Peckerwood was here” alongside drawings of death faces with demon horns…