Areas of BG strewn with hate messages

BOWLING GREEN — Residents in several neighborhoods across Bowling Green woke up Tuesday morning to find messages containing hate speech on their front steps.

Personnel from the Bowling Green Police Department swept through the neighborhoods that received the messages and cleaned them up.

“We are aware and we have collected several from people who have called in,” said BGPD Public Information Officer Ronnie Ward.

According to photos of the messages obtained by the Daily News, the flyers were placed inside plastic bags with kernels of corn and grains of rice, which Ward suspects acted as a ballast when the bags were thrown.

Written on the flyers were anti-Jewish, anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans and anti-Black messages, along with wording that related to various conspiracies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine.

Ward said he learned about the messages around 7 a.m., but the department received calls “very early” Tuesday morning.

He said the department knows of drops along Sherwood Drive, Ironwood Drive and Wakefield Street, but the full scope of the messages is currently unknown.

“We know that it was a large area of Bowling Green, but we don’t know which street to which street,” he said.

He said the department has been in contact with the FBI along with the Warren County Sheriff’s Department, the WKU Police Department, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the Warren County Attorney’s Office.

BGPD is running an investigation into the messages. Ward said the department is currently reviewing video to determine who dropped the messages. He said if someone has video of the pamphlets being thrown, the department would likely want to see it to “line those all up.”

“We will stay in touch with the prosecutors to determine what charges would be appropriate once we locate the people involved,” Ward said.

Residents who may find additional messages on their property are encouraged to throw them away.

“There’s no evidentiary value to any of this,” Ward said. “We have lots of them already, so we think we have a large sample of what they were sending out.”