A member of an anti-government extremist group was allegedly seen near San José State campus, reigniting concerns in students following racist hate speech graffiti and mass shooting threats found on campus walls.
A picture of a man wearing a vest with the words “Boogaloo Boi Militia Crusader of GOD” on 6th Street and San Fernando Street was posted on the r/SJSU subreddit on Friday.
The Boogaloo movement is an extremist, far-right and anti-government movement founded on the idea that a second U.S. civil war is coming, according to the George Washington University Program of Extremism.
Michelle Smith McDonald, senior director of media relations at SJSU, said in an email sent to the Spartan Daily that students should report any suspicious activity to the University Police Department (UPD).
“Students should report to UPD anything they deem to be suspicious or unusual,” Smith McDonald said. “Time, Place, and Manner policies apply on campus property only.”
The Time, Place, and Manner policy is there to regulate expressive activities related to students, employees and non-affiliated individuals on campus, according to SJSU’s Interim California State University (CSU) Policy webpage.
Students and faculty can use the Spartan Safe App to report suspicious activity on campus, according to the Spartan Safe App webpage.
UPD and the San José Police Department did not respond to the Spartan Daily’s requests for comment in time for publication.
An event in the movement’s history is when a member, Steven Carrillo, shot multiple law enforcement officers and killed Damon Gutzwiller, Sergeant of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, in Ben Lomond of Santa Cruz County in 2020, according to an Aug. 27, 2022 CBS article.
Jonathan Rose, a local passerby, witnessed the increase in police presence on that day in Felton, a town outside of Ben Lomond.
“Cops, more than I’ve ever seen in my life— every local department, even the harbor patrol, just kept on coming and coming,” Rose said. “Most of them with either a rifle or shotgun slung over their shoulder.”
The Boogaloo movement initially emerged through online forums such as 4chan’s weapons and politics boards and began mobilizing offline in 2020, according to a Combating Terrorism Center at West Point article.
“Based on the fact that the movement is named after a 4chan meme, you’d think them to be the terminally online type, and by extension all talk, but apparently not,” Rose said.
Mobilization increased following the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, in which they’d participate in both peaceful and violent protests, according to the same article.
“I mean, unfortunately, it makes sense to a degree, violence being the voice of the voiceless and all that, given how voiceless people feel,” Rose said.
Some Boogaloo affiliates follow white supremacist ideology, although the movement as a whole does not follow the same belief and may not associate with white supremacists, according to a June 30, 2021 Center for Strategic & International Studies article.
The possibility that a member of an extremist militia group was near campus after the graffiti in MacQuarrie Hall on Tuesday raised concerns for fourth-year psychology student Jack Brooks.
He said he believed he was one of the first to hear about the graffiti in MacQuarrie Hall on Tuesday because his friend had first posted about it.
“We were all very concerned to the point that we thought we should send out information,” Brooks said. “This week I had multiple tests, and I feel like there’s no coincidence that this threat was received around the time that I was having all my tests.”
The graffiti was written on a second-floor men’s bathroom stall in MacQuarrie Hall with racist slurs and shooting threats for Nov. 19-21, according to a Monday Spartan Daily article.
Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., the provost and senior vice president of Academic Affairs, released two statements campus-wide notifying the campus community of the initial mass shooting threat incident on Tuesday.
The statement noted that the university invested in additional security measures, such as expanded cameras in public and exterior areas of residence halls and lighting improvements, according to the same email statement.
“My apartment has more security than it did last year, they make you check IDs when you come into the apartment because a bunch of people kept coming in and out of the apartment building that did not belong there,” Brooks said.
Mari Fuentes-Martin, the Vice President for Student Affairs, sent a campuswide email to students on Oct. 29, saying that there were three incidents in October of racist and discriminatory language written in campus residence halls.
Entering residence hall facilities is restricted to residents who have a valid access card, enforced by Housing and Residential Education, Facilities Services, and UPD, according to a SJSU 2025 Annual Security report
“There are parts of campus I don’t feel safe,” Brooks said. “I don’t feel really safe around the library, but for the most part, I feel safe. But this (the threats) was a little scary.”
