Victim’s mother spurns Trump
The mother of the woman who was run down by a car during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., said Friday that after hearing President Trump’s comments equating white supremacist protesters with those demonstrating against them, she does not wish to speak with him.
“I’m not talking to the president now; I’m sorry,” Susan Bro said. “After what he said about my child.”
In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Bro said she had initially missed several calls from the White House, the first of which came during the funeral of her daughter, Heather Heyer, who was killed when a man drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters Saturday.
She said she was too busy with the funeral and working to set up a foundation in her daughter’s name to watch the news until Thursday night. That was when she saw footage of Trump’s explosive Tuesday news conference, in which he said that there was “blame on both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville.
“I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists,” Bro said.
She acknowledged a statement that she had released Monday, in which she thanked Trump for his “words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred” that day. But she said that after hearing his Tuesday comments, which effectively reversed what he had said the day before, she decided that she did not want to hear from him.
“You can’t wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying ‘I’m sorry,’ ” she added. “I’m not forgiving for that.”
Asked toward the end of the interview Friday if there was a message she wanted to convey to the president, Bro was brief: “Think before you speak,” she said.
A White House spokeswoman, Lindsay Walters, had said that the White House was looking to set up a “convenient” time for the president to talk to Bro. Trump had tweeted Wednesday that Heyer was “a truly special young woman” who would be “long remembered by all!”
He did not mention Heyer by name in his Tuesday news conference but several times referred to Bro’s statement thanking him for asserting that “racism is evil.”
Heyer, 32, was one of a crowd of counterprotesters struck by a car that police say was driven by James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio. Nineteen people were injured.