Racist Graffiti Reward Raised to $2K

UPDATE: 1:01 p.m. Lt. Tim O'Malley, the commander of the Criminal Investigations Division inside the Concord Police Department, has just announced that a Concord businessman, who wishes to remain anonymous, is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of a suspect in the racist graffiti case. This $1,000 will be added to the Crimeline's $1,000 reward, to raise the total reward to $2,000.

The original story is below, posted at 9:54 a.m., is below:

Investigators within the have begun to canvass the city’s South End neighborhood hoping to .

In the leaflets, investigators note the similarities between the most recent incident, on Aug. 5, and two previous incidents on Perley and Thorndike streets, in 2011.

Police noted that both incidents occurred during the late Saturday and early morning Sunday hours; both used black marker; both targeted houses that were the homes of immigrant families; and the text from both incidents was neatly written and was free of grammatical errors.

The handout, which is included in this post, also shows various iterations of the suspect’s handwriting with comparisons of certain letters between the two incidents.

Investigators have doctored the text to remove the offensive language from the handwriting samples, and edited and reworded the samples to have the opposite meaning of the suspect’s intent.

Rewards of up to $1,000 are being offered for leads in the case.