Ittai Geiger was experiencing car trouble a few weeks ago and asked his father to come outside to take a look at the engine.
The 16-year-old junior at Cupertino’s Homestead High School and his father had finished up their work. That’s when they noticed three swastikas scratched into the hood.
“I have a jeep and sometimes I go off-roading and come to school with mud on it,” said Geiger. “Sometimes my friends write stuff in the mud, like ‘Hi Ittai,’ with their fingers.”
But this was no greeting. “My heart just dropped to the ground,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe, I was so overwhelmed.”
Geiger, who lives in Sunnyvale, said that he attends Homestead High School, which is not in his district, because of anti-Semitic taunts he was subjected to at Sunnyvale’s Peterson Elementary School.
He was the only Jewish kid he knew there, he said, and he was bullied on a regular basis. “They used to throw pennies on the ground and called me a penny pincher,” he said.
Geiger’s family filed a police report, and he was granted permission to attend a school with a larger Jewish population.
At Homestead, he said, there are many Jewish students as well as children of Israeli immigrants. Geiger’s father is Israeli, his mother is American. He had been much happier in the current school district, he said, but this incident brought back terrible memories.
The next day, Geiger reported the incident to the school. Unlike at Peterson, he said, where he felt no one did anything, the administration was responsive. Laurie Smith, the sheriff for Santa Clara County, spoke with Geiger.
Deputy Terrance Helm, a spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, confirmed that Smith had met with Geiger, but could not divulge what she said. While Geiger filed a report, with no witnesses or suspects, no investigation is going on, Helm said.
Geiger thinks the incident took place on campus, but there’s no way he can be sure.
Geiger said that he heard some teachers had their hubcaps stolen that same day, so perhaps it wasn’t done by students. Nevertheless, he is still very upset about the incident.
“It hit me so hard I was scared to come to school the next day,” he said. “It’s really traumatizing.”
Rose Gabaeff, assistant director of the Central Pacific Region of the Anti-Defamation League, said almost 10 percent of reported hate crimes took place in high schools and colleges in 2003, according to a report issued by the state’s attorney general’s office.
“We are very concerned about the situation in high schools and with young people,” she said. While Gabaeff and Geiger had been exchanging phone messages, they had not yet spoken by press time.
Overall, Gabaeff noted that more hate crimes of this nature take place in San Francisco than in the South Bay.