Oak Park homeowners are spreading love this Valentine's Day, instead of the hate they've experienced over the past two years.
In 2021, co-homeowners and family-friends Sarah Jolie and Rob Huber's house burned down. While they worked to rebuild, they placed flags on the fence surrounding their property. Typically those flags, displaying Pride and Black Lives Matter, sat on their porch.
“These flags let people know this is a place where they’re welcome," Rob Huber said.
However, they noticed the flags were torn two weeks into moving them to the fence.
"I’m naïve, I assumed it was weather," Sarah Jolie told NBC Chicago.
After replacing the ripped flags it happened again, signaling it was a vandal.
“Over the last 25 months we’ve had 27 police reports," Jolie said. In total, at least 58 flags were destroyed with paint or torn.
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Jolie and Huber caught the man on camera several times over the past two years, but say no one has been caught by police.
"The desecration of them, it feels really personal," Huber said. "There are people in our house, and neighbors who are personally represented by these flags and it’s a painful, painful act.”
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Instead of accepting the situation, they replace the flags each time.
“We need to always do everything as overtly possible to welcome people," Jolie said. “There is more love than hate in this community.”
The two are now giving the flags to a local artist to let that message of love and acceptance grow on a new scale.
“How wonderful an idea that these flags he attempted to destroy could be repurposed into something that is back to the inspiring message that we’re hoping to convey with them," Huber said. "Love trumps hate."
