HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. — Investigators combed through shards of glass, looked for residue of flammable accelerant and tried to narrow down the overnight hours when someone torched a local Republican Party office by throwing a flammable device through the window.
The mayor said he wasn’t aware of any surveillance footage from the immediate vicinity, and the office sits where there wouldn’t normally be foot traffic late at night — in a decades-old retail complex that backs up to a wooded area and is set back from a main road.
A bottle filled with flammable liquid was thrown through the window of the Orange County Republican Party headquarters early Sunday, damaging the interior before burning out, according to authorities.
Someone also spray-painted “Nazi Republicans leave town or else” on a nearby wall. The office was empty and no one was injured.
Local party officials reopened a makeshift operation on folding tables outside the office Monday while uniformed police looked on. Plainclothes investigators looked for evidence at the scene as state, local and federal investigators divided up leads.
“We have had people working on it from three different federal agencies, state agencies, our local folks, all day today, running down leads, working different parts of the investigation,” Hillsborough Police Chief Duane Hampton told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
He declined to say how confident he was that the evidence would lead to an arrest.
North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory spoke to reporters at the office, saying he’d never seen anything like it in his political career. McCrory, who’s been touring parts of the state ravaged by floods, said: “To come back near our state Capitol and see a broken window from a Molotov cocktail is unimaginable.”
He also questioned why it took Hillsborough authorities several hours after the 911 call to release information publicly Sunday, suggesting they had initially treated the crime as merely vandalism instead of something more serious.