Mother of slain protester says she has received death threats
Not even a week since her daughter Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, Susan Bro said she has received threats against her life.
“I’ve had death threats already . . . because of what I’m doing right this second,” Bro told MSNBC on Thursday, one day after Heyer was buried and a vigil at the University of Virginia drew hundreds of candle-bearing supporters. Heyer died Saturday during protests of a white supremacist rally after a driver with alleged Nazi-sympathies drove into a crowd, which also injured 19.
Bro said President Donald Trump’s insistence that there is blame “on both sides” — counterprotesters and throngs of white nationalists objecting to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue — was “irrelevant” because Heyer was a peaceful protester.
Anchor Katy Tur, stunned when Bro said she was receiving threats, asked why they were coming.
“Talk is fear to them,” Bro responded, describing the white nationalists. “I don’t know why. Talk is fear.”
Bro and spokespeople for the Charlottesville police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She also said she has yet to speak with Trump, who said he would reach out to her. Bro told Tur she has received three calls from the White House, but has not been able to return them amid media appearances and appointments to set up a foundation for Heyer.
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” Bro said at Heyer’s funeral to an ovation that lasted nearly a minute and a half from a packed theater in downtown Charlottesville.
“I’d rather have my child, but by golly if I got to give her up, we’re going to make it count,” she said.
Trump’s handling of the incident has drawn sharp rebuke from the public and both sides of the political aisle after he at first declined to condemn hate groups by name and defended some of the marchers who descended on Charlottesville.