Hamilton cricket club robbed, vandalized in possible hate crime
A cricket club in east Hamilton had its scoreboard burned, its pitch torn up and its trailer ransacked in an incident that's being considered by police as a possible hate crime.
Members of the Stoney Creek Cricket Academy (SCCA) reported a large amount of property destroyed or stolen when they discovered the damage on Christmas Day around 1:30 p.m. ET, police said.
"We went to check the ground and everything was messed up there," Raman Mandar, a player on the team, told CBC Hamilton. "I don't know when it happened, but we found it on Tuesday."
He said he and other team members found the trailer, which held their sporting gear, littered with beer bottles and sprayed with graffiti.
Almost all of the cricket equipment, as well as the team's riding lawnmower, had been stolen, Mandar said.
The vandals had also burned several Canadian flags the team used to line the field, as well as their scoreboard.
"Dirt bikes had driven over the cricket pitch and damaged the whole thing," added Harjit Punia, the team's general secretary.
"We are not making any money from this," he said of the destruction. "We are playing with our own money without any help. So it hurts very badly."
Adding insult to injury, graffiti contained ethnic slurs that trailer targeted people of South Asian descent.
"It was very racist," Mandar said.
He said he figures the culprits were teenagers, adding that in the summer, members of his team had a confrontation with a group of youths who hurled racial epithets.
“That’s what makes this a hate crime,” said Catherine Martin, a police spokeswoman, of the graffiti.
The Hamilton police hate crime unit is still investigating the incident, she noted.
