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'Kill all colonizers': Vandals desecrate Columbus statue in San Francisco with bright red paint
Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

'Kill all colonizers': Vandals desecrate Columbus statue in San Francisco with bright red paint

'Destroy all monuments of genocide'

Vandals desecrated a Christopher Columbus statue near Coit Tower on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill on Sunday night.

KPIX-TV reports that paint was fresh when workers arrived in the morning to begin their daily duties.

What are the details?

The vandals apparently dumped red paint over the Italian explorer's head, scrawled the symbol for "anarchy" on the stone in various places across the statue and its base, and also scrawled violent messages of death against "colonizers."

One such message of malice says, "Destroy all monuments of genocide." Another shouts, "Kill all colonizers."

In 2018, San Francisco opted to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day, which annually falls on the second Monday of October. The Monday holiday coincides with Italian Heritage Day.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin told the San Francisco Examiner that he is not pleased with the vandals' conduct.

"Coit Tower is a destination for locals and visitors alike and defacing public property is just the lowest form of behavior," he said.

What else?

Organizers of the city's Italian Heritage Festival expressed their disappointment in a statement to NBC.

"We are proud of more than 150 years of Italian-American history in the Bay Area, and choose to focus on bringing people together," a statement from the organization said.

At least one local Italian-American resident, however, appears to disagree with the organization.

"It serves him right," Robbie Sanguinetti, said of Columbus. "Mr. Columbus over there disrespected a lot of people, to put it lightly. I love my Italian heritage. I've been to Italy, Italy is a beautiful place. That said, it doesn't have to be anywhere else, especially when the heritage that was already here has its own way of being beautiful."

The San Francisco Police Department is investigating the incident.

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