Minneola, FL – Lake County detectives are investigating bags filled with antisemitic flyers that were found outside homes in Minneola on Wednesday night.
Resident Luke Fisher, who reported the flyer, thought it was targeted at him because of his Jewish background, but then he noticed there was a bag left in every driveway in his neighborhood.
“There was a QR code and it was a bunch of anti-Semitic and racist comments,” Fisher said. “You come to my home and drop hateful stuff in my driveway – I got a problem.”
Fisher found the flyer in his driveway when he and his friend headed out to grab ice cream. He said the flyer promoted hate speech against Jewish people and was inside a Ziploc bag with some small rocks.
“I thought, ‘well is this a hate crime?’ Because my dad is Jewish by nationality and that’s very near and dear to my heart because my great-great-grandma escaped from the Holocaust,” Fisher said.
Fisher then noticed the bags were also left in his neighbors’ driveways.
“On the other side of the street I’m like ‘is that another bag?!'” Fisher said. “Next thing I know there’s bags all up and down along here!”
Fisher and his friend went house to house between Meadow Park Drive and Park Valley Circle to pick up the bags before calling the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.
“We didn’t want other people walking out and their kids going ‘what’s that? What’s this?'” Fisher said. “Just this worthless, useless, hurtful, hateful crap, and I hate it so much because we already have enough problems in this world and people like that are causing way more issues than there needs to be.”
Lake County Lt. Fred Jones says several neighborhoods have recently reported similar anti-Semitic flyers.
“We’ve met with these homeowners, we’ve seen if they had any Ring video or if anything was captured that we can utilize to make contact with the person who did this,” Jones said. “It’s something that’s concerning to us because what we don’t want to see is something like this escalate.”
Detectives are working with the State Attorney’s Office to look for the person or group behind the flyers and to determine possible charges.
“Everybody deserves to be loved [and] everybody deserves to be treated with kindness,” Fisher said.
Jones said there will be more deputies in the Minneola neighborhood to keep an eye on things and to make sure residents feel safe.
