The mother of Charlottesville victim tells mourners to “make my daughter’s death worthwhile.”
Woman killed in Charlottesville car attack remembered as champion of justice, equality
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Heather Heyer’s loved ones, plus politicians and strangers who have elevated her into a symbol of resistance to hate and discrimination, gathered Wednesday to remember her as a committed activist who gave her life for the causes that made her who she was.
“Thank you for making the word ‘hate’ more real,” said her law office coworker Feda Khateeb-Wilson. “But ... thank you for making the word ‘love’ even stronger.”
In a packed old theater in the center of the college town that has become a racial battleground, those who knew Heyer turned her memorial into a call for understanding and action.
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” said her mother, Susan Bro, sparking an ovation from the packed auditorium, where Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Sen. Tim Kaine were among the crowd.
“No father should ever have to do this,” said Mark Heyer, his voice breaking on a stage filled with flowers and images of the 32-yearold paralegal who was killed Saturday when a car plowed into a crowd of protesters gathered to oppose a white supremacist rally.
One by one, Heyer’s family and friends stood to remember her liveliness and social dedication.
“At an early age she could call out something that wasn’t right to her,” said Heyer’s grandfather Elwood Schrader, who talked about the woman’s childhood. “In earlier years, she wanted fairness. She wanted justice.”
Mark Heyer recalled raising a defiant and compassionate daughter who always argued for what she thought was right. He said they didn’t always agree but that he always heard her perspective.
“Heather’s passion extended to her ideas, her thoughts. And her grandfather is right — she could tell when somebody wasn’t being straight.”
Heyer was killed when a Dodge Challenger plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. James Alex Fields Jr., who had come from Ohio for the protest, is charged with murder in her death.
“I have aged 10 years in the last week,” said Bro, Heyer’s mother. But from the podium, she turned her grief into a call to fight “as Heather would do.”
Bro spoke out forcefully against hating the man police say is responsible.
“Our daughter did not live a life of hate, and hating this young man is not going to solve anything,” Bro said of Fields, 20.
Her daughter’s life was about “fairness and equality and caring, and that’s what we want people to take away from this,” Bro said.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday praised Heyer as “an incredible young woman.”
After criticism of his initial response, which put blame “on many sides,” Trump on Monday condemned “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.”
In a news conference Tuesday, Trump again pointed to “blame on both sides” and argued that many of those gathered in Charlottesville were not white supremacists but were there to voice concern over the fate of a Robert E. Lee statue.
As the family departed at the end of the service, a woman’s outburst broke the hush as she yelled “Heather was a hero.”
She started to talk negatively about Trump but was drowned out by the audience telling her to sit down. She persisted until Bro asked her to be respectful of her daughter.
Two state troopers also died Saturday in the crash of their helicopter. The funerals for Berke M.M. Bates and H. Jay Cullen are set for Friday and Saturday.