By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

The owner of Middletown Plaza shopping center removed from a vacant area of the property a tractor trailer on Nov. 18 that was tagged with “Was Hitler Right” and a swastika.

Middletown Police received reports about the tagged truck the previous weekend.

“Once we were made aware of it, we got ahold of the owner of the property, who ended up having the truck removed,” Middletown Police Deputy Chief Ryan Morgan said. The truck was parked in the plaza’s lot near the southeast corner of South Breiel Boulevard and Caprice Drive.

“They allow trailers to just park there,” Morgan said of the plaza’s owner, and that no security cameras cover the vacant section of the shopping center. The nearest cameras, at Dedicated Motivated gym on the south end of the outdoor mall, were too far away to pick up any suspicious activity.

Middletown resident Josh Frost was driving by midmorning Nov. 18 with his girlfriend and their baby son when he saw the vandalized truck.

“We turned back around, we took a picture, and she started crying about it,” said Frost, who is Jewish and was raised in Englewood. His girlfriend said to him, “This isn’t how it usually is down here.”

“For her, it was traumatic just to have to deal with that,” Frost said. “For me it’s just irritating. We were on Breiel (Boulevard). That’s one of the main roads in Middletown. So hundreds of people, if not thousands, have passed that today. Thankfully, my kid’s young, but if my kid was older, he was going to be looking out my window and be like, ‘What does that mean?’ I feel bad for any other Jewish parents that have to have that conversation today because of that.”

In another incident, an Observer reader’s 13-year-old son documented a swastika spraypainted on concrete along a bike path Nov. 2 in Patterson Park behind Irving Commons on the Oakwood/Dayton line. The family reported it to the Anti-Defamation League and the Dayton Police Department.