Disabled veteran, father of slain officer dismayed over HOA order to take down Thin Blue Line flag

An Ohio veteran whose son was killed in the line of duty has been told by his HOA that he must remove the Thin Blue Line flag he flies on a flag pole in his front yard, Fox News reported.

Thomas DiSario is a disabled veteran and the father of Kirkersville, Ohio police chief Steven Eric DiSario. The junior DiSario was a father of six with a seventh child on the way when he was gunned down in a nursing home shooting in 2017. While responding to a call at the Pine Kirk Care Center, he was shot and killed along with two employees before the shooter killed himself.

“He was answering a call in Kirkersville, and he was shot and murdered as he got there. So, he didn’t even know it was coming,” Thomas DiSario said, according to Fox News.

The department gifted the flag to DiSario’s father.

“It’s been flying since the 12th of May 2017,” Thomas DiSario said. “The only time it comes down [is] if it’s worn out and I buy a new one and put it back up.”

“The political sign in the form of a flag must be removed from your property,” the letter dated Friday to DiSario from the Omni Community Association Managers said. “The flag on your pole is not a United States Flag. It is a political statement. Please remove the flag from your property.”


(Video: NBC4 Columbus)

In addition to the homeowners association demanding the elder DiSario remove the flag honoring his son, DiSario told WCMH-TV that he had to call the police when one individual not associated with the HOA tried to physically remove the flag on their own.

“I had a gentleman come in my yard, lower the flags, and [he] wiped his face on them,” DiSario said. “I, in turn, asked him to leave. He would not, and I put him out of my yard. He came back … sat on my rock, then he proceeded to get up and take the flags down again, and I stopped him and put him out of my yard.”

David Dye, president of the Omni Community Association Managers, confirmed to the outlet the man on DiSarios’s property was not affiliated with the HOA, but said in moving to the community, all homeowners must necessarily abide by the deed restrictions laid out by the HOA.

“They bought into the community with rules,” Dye said. “He agreed by buying in this community that he can’t display what he wants to display.”

“Sometimes signs masquerade as flags or as light displays, as examples,” Dye tried to argue. “The board has adopted this and, as a sign, we don’t get to judge what it says.”

“We have had to ask people to remove a sign advertising a nativity display, as an example. It doesn’t matter whether we agree. If it’s a sign, you are not allowed to post it, according to the deed restrictions,” he explained.

DiSario has continued to fly the flag on his front lawn. As Fox News noted, this week is National Police Week in the U.S.

“I spent 23 years in the military, and there’s no way shape or form that flag is being flown disrespectful at all,” he said. “It has a 4×6 American flag above it, and the police flag is a 3×5 below it. It is no bigger than the top flag.”

DiSario added, “It represents my son and nothing else. So I don’t know why everybody is now harassing me that I have to take it down.”

The U.S. has seen an abominable uptick in violence against law enforcement officers in the last 2-plus years, owing in part to falsehoods propagated by militant left-wing groups such as ANTIFA and the largely factitious Black Lives Matter organization.

The National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) has the tally of officers shot in the line of duty at 101 as of April 1, with 17 fatalities so far in 2022. That is a 43 percent increase compared to the number of officers shot during the same period in 2021 and a 63 percent increase compared to 2020, FOP reports.

“We are in the midst of a real crisis. The violence directed at law enforcement officers is unlike anything I’ve seen in my 36 years of law enforcement,” National FOP President Patrick Yoes said in April. “Last year was one of the most dangerous years for law enforcement, with more officers shot in the line of duty since the National Fraternal Order of Police began recording this data.”

Reactions on Twitter to the Fox News story were both critical of the HOA and innumerable. Here are but a few:

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