La Raza Student Association received a death threat on Saturday Sept. 16 after a man began posting crude and discriminating comments on La Raza’s Facebook page. The comments eventually escalated into violence and death threats toward students involved in the organization.
The Cal State Long Beach University Police Department and administration have been notified and there is currently an active investigation underway.
“The man posted [that] if he sees a La Raza officer he’s going to shoot them on sight,” said Asia Gonzalaz, a 19-year-old political science major and member of La Raza. “He commented on a photo of our [club] advisor saying ‘this is the next target.’”
An email sent out Tuesday morning to members of La Raza from the La Raza Student Association official to inform students of the threats and to be aware of their surroundings. The email also informed students that there will be an added layer of police presence.
According to Cynthia Schultheis, assistant director for the Multicultural Center, on Sunday, Christian Lozano-Cuellar, the assistant director of multicultural affairs found fliers that were posted on the doors and windows of the Multicultural Center with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler printed on them.
“Its disturbing to say the least, the fliers said ‘finish what he started,’” Schultheis said. “Others said ‘aryanunderground.com.’ From what I understand there might have even been similar postings around campus this weekend.”
Schultheis added that the police took a report but did not want to report it as vandalism.
“They told us it was freedom of speech,” Schultheis said. “It’s not speech, they plastered hate crap on our doors. It took us an hour to get the adhesives off the window.”
According to Lieutenant Richard Goodwin of the UPD, there is an investigation in progress but he could not comment on the details of the investigation.
“We’re in it all the way,” Goodwin said. “We don’t want anyone to feel like we aren’t doing our job, communication is a big part of this.”
Goodwin says that a typical approach to investigating an online death threat would be to see what leads they have and search computer IP addresses to try and locate where the person may have posted the threats from.
“In an investigation, there are so many angles to take and a situation where computers are involved, you can do searches to find out what was posted and when.”
Goodwin also added that he cannot comment on whether the death threats and the fliers left in the multicultural center are connected or not.
The Daily 49er will update this story as it progresses.