Editorial: A duty to speak up when we hear hate speech

The Gold Bar man, a former student at Sultan High School and now enrolled at Western Washington University in Bellingham, was arrested late last month in connection with a string of vandalism reports that involved racist and homophobic slurs and a threat of sexual violence.

Shayne Robert Merwin, 20, was booked into Whatcom County Jail on charges of residential burglary the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Name tags on the doors of student dorm rooms were vandalized and racial epithets were scrawled on a large outdoor sculpture and a building pillar on campus.