GREENWICH — Overnight Wednesday, someone using black spray paint ventured onto private property to deface two large Tedra Cobb for Congress signs and scrawl a racial slur on the side of a private home about two blocks away.

The house on Salem Street, owned by Luke Anderson, had a Black Lives Matter sign displayed in a window. The vandal spray-painted through a screen and over the glass to obscure the sign then wrote the racial slur on the side of the house.

Anderson is white, and the graffiti prefaced the slur with the word “white.”

Officer Davis-Flynn with the Cambridge-Greenwich Police Department said a resident out walking at about 5:30 Thursday morning spotted a man in the area with a bowl-style haircut. Police are also reviewing video from nearby businesses and asking any neighbors who saw anything or have video to contact the department at 518-677-3044.

Anderson had already removed the graffiti by the middle of the day Thursday.

“I couldn’t leave that sitting on the side of the building for the day,” he said.

The paint on the window came off with mineral spirits and a razor blade, but he had to scrape and sand the wood clapboard on the side of the house, he said.

“It took the whole morning to do it,” he said.

Anderson, 32, grew up in Greenwich and lives in the house with his girlfriend. He has never felt threatened in the town, which he called a “very friendly place.”

He and his girlfriend put the Black Lives Matter sign up after the killing by police officers in Minneapolis of George Floyd, but he’s not sure he’ll put it back in the window.

“It’s really disheartening for me,” he said. “I don’t want to have to do this again.”

Sara Idleman, a Democrat who served for 10 years as town supervisor until she lost a bid for re-election last November, said political signs have been defaced before, but racist graffiti is new.

Idleman said that two years ago, a large Tedra Cobb sign was defaced before the 2018 election, also a contest between Cobb and Stefanik. Other signs for Democrats have been stolen and damaged over the last several years, she said.

“Almost every sign we’ve put up has been ruined,” she said.

“Back in the ’80s, we had some vandalism at school,” said Idleman, who has lived in Greenwich her whole life. “But there hasn’t been anything, nothing like what happened at Luke’s building.”

A group of 10 or 12 local people, including her some weeks, stands in silent vigil for an hour every Saturday in Mowry Park in the heart of town, recognizing Black people such as Floyd and others who have been killed by police in recent years.

It’s a group of “mostly older people,” she said.

“It’s an effective way to protest,” she said. “As effective as anything.”