'There's no room anywhere for hate': Atascocita neighborhoods find racist flyers on driveways

ATASCOCITA, Texas (KTRK) -- Two Atascocita subdivisions found dozens of racist pamphlets on residents' driveway on Sunday forcing two mothers to take action and clean up the hundreds of flyers.

Stacie Brady said at about 11:51 p.m. Saturday night, her home surveillance video showed a vehicle with someone throwing plastic bags with rocks and a piece of paper inside. The flyer had anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric on it.

Brady said she spent three hours going from one driveway to the next, picking up the plastic bags.

"As we were leaving to get something to eat, we saw more," Brady said. "We didn't want anybody to wake up to that in the morning. Sunday morning, people going to church. I didn't want people to see that, so we had to do something."

Brady said she picked up hundreds of flyers. In the adjacent subdivision, Atascocita South, there were more fliers found on residents' driveways.

Johanna Odell said she has lived in the area for 17 years and was horrified to find the flyer on her driveway Sunday morning.

"I didn't even look at the rest. I was just so livid," Odell said. "I looked around and saw that the same bags were in my neighbors' driveways so I went around and started picking them up because I didn't want my neighbors waking up to find this trash in our neighborhood, you know, this hate. It's upsetting."

Odell had a trash bag full of the flyers she found. Other neighbors said they contacted Harris County Constable Precinct 4 regarding the racist flyers, but it was unclear if an official incident report has been filed.

"Teaching love and peace instead of hate," Odell said. "I can't believe we are still dealing with this in 2022, and we want to send a message to the people that did this. It's not going to be tolerated here. We're not going to have it. Don't come here. We don't need hate. We want only peace and love."

Mark Toubin, the southwest regional director of the Anti-Defamation League , told ABC13 there has been reports of flyers with white supremacist propaganda in the southwest region including the Harris County area and Bexar County area almost every weekend.

"First, call law enforcement," Toubin said. "It's unclear whether the dissemination of these really filthy materials are a violation of the law, but it's certainly important to call law enforcement and have them investigate and determine if it is. If so, if they can locate the perpetrators."

Toubin said the ADL is also keeping track of the organizations that are distributing these flyers in neighborhoods in the area. You can report any incident on the ADL website.

"We understand that the people that find this in their yards or their driveways are outraged and upset, as they should be," Toubin said. "But, we do applaud the people in Atascocita and elsewhere who recognize that these are messages of hate and that they are wrong. They're designed to attract attention for these organizations and so we appreciate when people who find these, not only reject the flyers and their messages, but reject the hate."

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