2 arrested for vandalizing U. of North Carolina memorial

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Police at North Carolina’s flagship public university say they’ve arrested two people accused of vandalizing a monument to enslaved and free black workers who built the school.

University of North Carolina police say 31-year-old Ryan Francis Barnett of Sanford and 50-year-old Nancy Rushton McCorkle of Newberry, South Carolina, were arrested Monday. They face misdemeanour charges of damaging property and ethnic intimidation.

Neither had listed phone numbers.

They’re accused of marking the Unsung Founders Memorial last month with what the Chapel Hill campus’s interim chancellor said was “racist language.”

The memorial is in a central plaza that also featured a statue of a Confederate soldier before protesters tore it down in August.