A Staten Island man believes his support for Donald Trump has rendered him the victim of a hate crime.
In late May, optician Sam Pirozzolo erected a giant American-flag-emblazoned “T” on his lawn in the Castleton Corners neighborhood to demonstrate his proud support for the Republican nominee. Early Sunday morning, as Pirozzolo recounted to the Village Voice, he was awoken by his daughter to find the sculpture engulfed in flames.
“It looked like a big KKK cross burning on my lawn, just telling me to shut up,” Pirozzolo told the Voice.
The flames had mostly subsided by the time authorities arrived on the scene, Pirozzolo said, but firefighters reportedly told him that they smelled gasoline on the sculpture. The Voice reported that the New York Police Department is treating the incident, for which no suspect has yet been named, as arson.
Pirozzolo claims that this doesn’t address the fact that he was targeted for his political beliefs. On Facebook, Pirozzolo attributed the fire to “pro Hillary Clinton thugs.”
“We’ve created hate crime laws to protect specific individuals. If you’re gay or Jewish or religious or transgender, you have a hate crime law to protect you,” Pirozzolo told the Voice. “The average person, who has a fire on his lawn, that’s not a hate crime? We shouldn’t be making laws to protect a specific class of people. We should be protecting every class of people.”
In New York state, a hate crime is defined as a criminal offense targeting a person’s “race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation.”
Pirozzolo told the Washington Post that he received accolades for his public display of support in a Monday phone call from the Republican nominee himself.
“He laughed and he said we were more popular than he was today,” Pirozzolo told the Post. “To hear that that was Donald Trump was an amazing thing.”
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to the Post’s request for confirmation of the call’s details.
Pirozzolo said he would not back down from publicly supporting Trump in the wake of the arson incident. The proud conservative told the Voice that he has commissioned Staten Island artist Scott LoBaido—who has made other statues for Pirozzolo memorializing the NYPD, the New York Mets, and Christmas—to create a new, taller “T” for his lawn.
