Victim in Virginia melee wept for social justice, her boss says
(Reuters) - Heather Heyer came to downtown Charlottesville with her friends to make a stand against white nationalists who converged on the Virginia college town to demand the city keep a statue honoring a Confederate war hero, her boss said on Sunday.
The 32-year-old paralegal wanted to send a clear message to the neoNazis and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers who planned to stage one of the largest far-right rallies in recent U.S. history that people abhor their views in the city where she was born, he said.
But her decision to join counter-protesters on Saturday resulted in tragedy when a 20-year-old Ohio man drove his car at high speed into a line of marchers, killing Heyer and injuring at least 19 others.
A strong sense of social justice was a constant theme in Heyer’s personal and working life, said Alfred Wilson, bankruptcy division manager at the Miller Law Group.
“There have been times that I’ve walked back to her office and she had tears in her eyes” for various injustices she saw in the world, said Wilson, such as the time she was weeping after reading anti-Muslim comments online, Wilson said.
Heyer was “a very strong, very opinionated young woman” who “made known that she was all about equality,” he told Reuters on Sunday.
The two have worked closely since Heyer joined the firm a little more than five years ago.