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Black Man Arrested for Racist Graffiti on College Campus

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A Black man has been arrested for spray-painting racist graffiti on Eastern Michigan University’s campus over a six-month period, reports the New York Daily News. Eddie Curlin was identified as the suspect in a string of anti-Black vandalism acts — a large “KKK” inscribed on one building and the N-word on another, with a message telling Black students to leave the school. The three incidents happened in September and October 2016 along with another this spring, sparking outrage throughout the school, located just southwest of Ann Arbor. Campus police didn’t have much information until Wednesday, when the 29-year-old Curlin was arraigned in Washtenaw County District Court, according to a news release from the school. Curlin — who attended Eastern Michigan from 2014 to early 2016 — was already in custody, serving a one-to-five jail sentence on unrelated stolen property charges, the release indicates. He was sentenced in that case in August. The school noted campus police spent 1,080 hours on the investigation, reviewing 1,200 hours of surveillance video and conducting more than 60 interviews. The FBI and Michigan State Police chipped in to help. The release didn’t indicate how the probe eventually led them to charge Curlin with malicious destruction of property, identity theft and using computers to commit a crime. “It was totally self-serving, it was not driven by politics and it was not driven by race,” campus police Chief Robert Heighes said. “It was an individual item done by one individual for all three major graffiti incidents on our campus.” Heighes told local media the identity theft charge wasn’t tied to the graffiti, but arose during the investigation.

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