A white supremacist group has targeted Front Range communities over the past month, placing stickers and posters in well-known Denver locations.
Since Monday, Identity Evropa has tweeted pictures showing their posters and stickers with their logo — a white and teal triangle — plastered across the Denver metro area. The photos show stickers in Civic Center Park and the 16th Street Mall. Other photos show a pair of the group’s members holding their flag in the park.
Over the past 30 days, photos from the group show the same materials in Wheat Ridge, Boulder, Fort Collins, Arvada, Loveland and Greeley. The group also held small gatherings at U.S. Immigration and Customs facilities in Centennial and Aurora to thank the agency’s officials for their work.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies Identity Evropa as a hate group, one of 21 in Colorado.
“Identity Evropa is at the forefront of the racist ‘alt-right’s’ effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism,” the center’s website states.
Identity Evropa members helped plan the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, where rally attendees chanted racist slogans and performed the Nazi salute. A man connected to the white supremacist movement killed a woman at the rally when he drove into a crowd of counter-protesters.
The group has said that it is not racist, but believes in the “preservation of white American culture.” The group advocates for ending all immigration to the U.S. that will “alter America’s historic demographic.”
As the group has upped its efforts in the area, an unknown person spray painted a swastika onto a trail in north Colorado Springs.
Brad Sherman was walking his dogs down the Briargate Trail on Monday evening when he found a large, black swastika painted on the path. He walks the trail behind his home multiple times a week but had been out of town recently and wasn’t sure when the swastika was painted, he said Thursday afternoon.
He reported the swastika to police and public works the next morning, he said. Sherman said he has lived in the neighborhood since 2009 and had never seen anything similar.
“(Briargate Trail) is my quiet place to relax from my day,” said Sherman, who is an attorney. “To see a swastika in the middle of it is fairly upsetting.”
The swastika remained on the sidewalk Wednesday evening, Sherman said.
Incidents like the swastika can be difficult to investigate, Colorado Springs police spokesman Sgt. Craig Simpson said. Police will look for surveillance footage or anybody who saw the act, he said.
“Those kinds of activities are not tolerated in our community,” he said.
An unknown person painted a swastika and anti-Semitic slogans on a Colorado Springs synagogue last year.