The vandals who drew the ire of city officials by targeting members of the Brooklyn Museum executive board earlier this month wore surgical masks and baseball caps to cover their faces and tried to avoid surveillance cameras at all costs, the NYPD said Saturday as new images of the suspects were released.
Out of the six suspects who splattered red paint outside the home of Brooklyn Museum Executive Director Anne Pasternak and other board members, four of them had their faces covered and kept their heads down to avoid having their faces recovered by surveillance cameras.
A fifth vandal wore a surgical mask, but no hat, surveillance video of the six suspects in a building elevator released Saturday showed. Only one brazen vandal had his face not covered.
The suspects are believed to be responsible for tossing red paint on Pasternak’s Brooklyn Heights home during an early-morning raid on June 12 and painting inverted red triangles on the doors, which Jewish advocates say are “symbols used by terrorists to mark targets they want to take out.”
The NYPD is labeling the incident a hate crime. So far, no arrests have been made.
DCPI
New images released of pro-Palestinian vandals who defaced homes of Brooklyn Museum execs: police
A Brooklyn home in Cobble Hill, plus two in Manhattan, were also targeted. Police have not determined if the same five suspects were behind those incidents.
The activists unfurled a banner outside the executive director’s home that was peppered with red handprints and read “Anne Pasternak Brooklyn Museum White-Supremacist Zionist,” and used stencils to write “Blood on your hands,” cops said.
Video of the vandalism in progress was posted to the Instagram account for A15 Actions, an international, decentralized group of activists with the goal of disrupting economies they see as participating in the bloodshed in Gaza.
A statement published along with the video said “artists and cultural workers” were responsible for the vandalism, and it was done in response to what the activists see as the Brooklyn Museum’s betrayal by supposedly calling the police during a protest there on May 31.
That day, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the museum calling on it to divest from Israel, with some getting into the building and setting up tents before NYPD cops arrested 34 protesters.
On the same night, 15 vandals on the Upper East Side splattered the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations with red paint. The suspects fled the scene in a white U-Haul truck.
The German Consulate in Manhattan was also hit with red paint that Wednesday, and according to a social media post by Palestine Action US, plastered with flyers reading in part, “We sincerely apologize for the genocide we are committing in Gaza.”
Cops are asking the public’s help identifying the five suspects in the Brooklyn Heights vandalism. Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.
