‘A strong woman all about equality’
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 honouring a Confederate war hero, her boss said yesterday.
The 32-year-old paralegal wanted to send a clear message to the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan sympathisers who planned to stage one of the largest farright rallies in recent US history that people abhor their views in the city where she was born, he said.
But her decision to join counterprotesters on Sunday 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.
Police have charged James Alex Fields jnr, with second-degree murder and other counts. A former high school teacher of his said Fields was fascinated with Nazism, idolised Adolf Hitler, and had been singled out by school officials for his “deeply held, radical” convictions on race.
Heyer, though, showed a strong sense of social justice in her 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 yesterday.
The two had worked closely since Heyer joined the firm a little more than five years ago.
A big part of Heyer’s job was to help people who were trying to avoid being evicted from their homes, or have their cars repossessed, or needed help paying medical bills, he said.
As a white woman, she thought it unfair that she enjoyed liberties that Wilson, as a black man, did not, he said.
Heyer, said Wilson, was strongly opposed to President Donald Trump, and she also spoke out against Jason Kessler, the blogger who organised the “Unite the Right” rally.