NEW YORK — New York City police are investigating swastikas and hate speech scrawled on a statue of Jackie Robinson and a teammate outside Brooklyn’s minor league baseball stadium.
A manager at MCU Park noticed the defacement Wednesday at about 8:30 a.m. The words “Heil Hitler,” an expletive and racist epithets were scrawled on the statue in black marker. Workers later covered up the vandalism.
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Police are investigating it as a hate crime and are hunting for video evidence.
The statue is of Brooklyn Dodgers teammate Pee Wee Reese with his arm around Robinson. It commemorates the moment in Cincinnati when Reese, who was white, showed solidarity with Robinson amid hateful reactions to the integration of Major League Baseball. The moment was recreated in the recent movie “42.”
MCU Park in Coney Island is the stadium for the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets. The team marked the return of professional baseball to Brooklyn, which lost the Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s.
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