HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. -- Investigators combed through shards of glass, looked for residue of flammable accelerant and tried to narrow down the time when someone torched a Republican Party office by throwing a flammable device through the window.
The Hillsborough mayor said he wasn't aware of any surveillance footage from the immediate vicinity, and the office sits where there wouldn't normally be foot traffic late at night.
A bottle filled with flammable liquid was thrown through the window of the Orange County Republican Party headquarters early Sunday, damaging the interior before burning out, according to authorities. Someone also spray-painted "Nazi Republicans leave town or else" on a nearby wall. The office was empty and no one was injured.
Local party officials reopened a makeshift operation on folding tables outside the office Monday while uniformed police looked on. Plainclothes investigators looked for evidence at the scene as state, local and federal investigators divided up leads.
"We have had people working on it from three different federal agencies, state agencies, our local folks, all day today, running down leads, working different parts of the investigation," Hillsborough Police Chief Duane Hampton said in a phone interview from the town about 40 miles northwest of Raleigh.
He declined to say how confident he was that the evidence would lead to an arrest.
North Carolina's Republican Gov. Pat McCrory spoke to reporters at the office, saying he'd never seen anything like it in his political career.
"To come back near our state Capitol and see a broken window from a Molotov cocktail is unimaginable," McCrory said.
He also questioned why it took Hillsborough authorities several hours after the 911 call to release information publicly Sunday, suggesting that they had initially treated the crime as merely vandalism.
But Hampton said federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were called immediately and arrived on the scene within an hour of his own officers.
"I certainly don't want anyone to think that we didn't take this seriously, because we realized the implications right away," he said.
County GOP Chairman Daniel Ashley arrived Sunday morning to find the area roped off by yellow police tape. He said he believes that whoever's responsible intended to burn down the building.
The violent act has been condemned by public figures across the political spectrum, including Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Democrats started a campaign to raise $10,000 to reopen the GOP office, meeting the goal in less than 40 minutes, wrote the GoFundMe drive's creator, David Weinberger, a researcher at Harvard University.
"It's a great gesture. We appreciate it a lot, but I don't know how much of that we're going to get to use because of the campaign laws," Ashley said Monday.
A Section on 10/18/2016