4 men suspected of hanging ‘Hitler was right’ banner on Arizona bridge arrested for trespassing

QUEEN CREEK, Ariz. — Four men suspected of hanging a white supremacist banner on a Queen Creek, Arizona, railroad bridge were arrested Aug. 1 and charged with trespassing.

According to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the men, who range in age from 27 to 38, were seen around 10 a.m. hanging a banner on the bridge that read “Hitler was right,” KPNX reported.

Three of the men are from Arizona, and one is from Oklahoma, the TV station reported.

“It’s unfortunate these individuals would stoop to such stupidity, climb out on bridges hang hateful material and that they wouldn’t do something better with their lives. People who don’t have a strong enough sense of history or their own identity gravitate toward hate communities that give them this little hit, a feeling they’re accepted but unfortunately this leads down a path to nowhere,” Paul Rockower, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix, told KPNX.

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reported that authorities are declining to pursue the incident as a hate crime and, citing the Anti-Defamation League, stated the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Arizona declined from 58 in 2018 to 30 in 2019. Year-to-date figures for 2020 are not available.

The men, who have not been publicly identified, have each been cited with a Class 3 misdemeanor trespassing violation, and the sheriff’s office has forwarded the case to the town of Queen Creek for possible zoning violations, KPNX reported.

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