Update October 20th: Stevens charged with hate crime, here.
Here is the story yesterday at the Concord Monitor. There may be more updates today, but I haven’t seen them yet. Here is what we said about this case back in 2011.
A Pembroke tattoo artist was arrested this morning for his alleged role in a 2011 graffiti incident in which three refugee homes in South Concord were defaced with racist, xenophobic messages, an event that sparked widespread outrage.
Raymond “Raynard” Stevens, 42, was apprehended around 9 a.m. at his home in Pembroke, Concord Police Chief John Duval said. Stevens has been charged with one Class B felony for criminal mischief, an offense that can bring a prison sentence of between one and seven years but could bring more in this case because of a state hate crime statute.
[…..]
The messages Stevens stands accused of composing were discovered on Sept. 18, 2011. Etched in black marker across the clapboard facades of the Perley and Downing street homes, they declared that the city had been sullied by the refugees’ arrivals from Rwanda, Somalia and the Congo.
According to the Monitor, Stevens was a regular on facebook describing himself as an animal-lover, an environmentalist and a proud Aryan man. Here is an excerpt of one of his facebook posts:
Stevens does not appear to have made any postings on or near the date of the vandalism, or if he did they have since been removed. In a Facebook post on Feb. 2, 2012, though, he shared some of his views on race: “I hate the argument that we cant help what race we were born into, and therefor you should not be proud of your race (unless your a minority). you are allowed to be proud of your race when you can look at your self and say . i am born in to a fine line of men and women that did stupendously miraculous things with the world around them.”
“if your culture produced many advances before you, it will be likely passed down into you,” he continued later in the post. “when your born into a third world nation, you wouldn’t understand that. being that you look at the people of your kind that came before you and see they built nearly nothing in the same time span of other more successful races.”
Authorities obviously put a lot of energy into capturing this writer with dangerous ideas. He should have just stuck to writing on his facebook page and not on peoples’ homes.
…..the arrest the result of a “multi-agency effort with vital assistance provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Attorney’s Office, the Merrimack County Attorney’s Office, the Nashua Police Department, and the Pembroke Police Department.”