BOLINGBROOK – Bolingbrook Mayor Roger Claar's home was vandalized with swastikas and a demand that he resign from office, Bolingbrook police told the Herald News this week.
The alleged culprit was caught and confessed spray painting on the mayor's home and two nearby properties Wednesday, the police report said.
"Anarchist symbols and Nazi swastikas were spray painted on the home, and there was spray painting on the private driveway and public sidewalk," police said. "Detectives quickly identified a suspect who was taken into custody later the same day. The offender, Rachel Tuszynski, 29 years of age, of the 200 block of Coral Court Bolingbrook, provided a full confession."
Mayor Claar thumbed the noses of Chicago area Democrats and Leftists when he hosted a fundraiser for then-Republican candidate Donald Trump last September, weeks before Trump won the November 2016 election.
His support for Trump contributed to his own fierce re-election race this past spring, where Claar, who has been a southwest suburban mayor for 32 years, won with less than 150 votes.
Tuszynski was charged with hate crime, criminal damage to government property, threatening a public official, theft and criminal defacement of property.
The Bolingbrook resident told an Associated Press reporter in 2014 at a Black Lives Matter protest in Utah that she had been protesting since 2007, when she began opposing the war in Iraq.
At 26, Rachel Tuszynski is hardly new to protest. She marched against the Iraq war in 2007 and, more recently, demonstrated in favor of legalizing medical marijuana. Then, last Thursday, Tuszynski and her girlfriend drove into downtown Chicago on an errand and, motivated by spontaneous curiosity, went looking for a march against police brutality that they'd heard about on the radio.
"We drove down Michigan Avenue until we couldn't," said Tuszynski. "I was in slippers … and I heard helicopters and police and I just hopped out of the car," joining protesters shouting "Hands Up. Don't Shoot." When someone handed her a sign with the message, "Ferguson is Everywhere," she grabbed it.
"It's like I have an internal fire and I am deeply, deeply upset by injustice. To me, this is injustice," she said.
Tuszynski, who works as a cook in a restaurant and who shares Puerto Rican, Italian and Polish ancestry, acknowledges that it's not injustice that victimizes her directly.
And yet, with short-cropped hair that draws attention to her identity as a lesbian, she said she is often stared at by passersby and sometimes hassled. She has heard from black, male friends about being pulled over by police and ordered out of their cars for little if any apparent reason. While their experiences are different, it is easy to relate, she said.
So much so that in the days since Tuszynski has grown hoarse from shouting at protests and taken time off from work to participate.
"I want someone to hear us, that's all I want. I want people to know that Chicago stands with Ferguson, and stands with every black person in America who feels afraid."
more to come …
