An 8-year-old interracial girl in Illinois received a disturbing racist threat in the mail that read in part, “keep that nasty Black thing under control”.
The girl’s family is working with police after they received the anonymous letter in the mail on Aug. 23.
“You better keep that nasty black thing under control otherwise you just might find it in a ditch somewhere,” the writer said in the letter CBS affiliate WMBD-TV obtained. “Nothing but garbage ALL of YOU! Get out of this neighborhood. You are nothing [but] trash.”
8-year-old Audrey Harvey’s great-grandmother, Leona Heller, is the one who opened the racist letter at her Canton home. The anonymous writer also added that “this is the “1st warning.” Heller told WMBD she cried when she got it.
“When I opened it and I seen the letter I got really mad [and] angry and I just wanted to go around and knock on everyone’s door and find out where this letter came from,” she said. “What right do you have to say this to my grand daughter?”
Heller told WMBD that her grandchild is now too afraid to play outside.
“My granddaughter is paranoid,” she said. “She won’t go off this street and that’s not right.”
When asked by reporters what she thinks would happen if she rode her bike around the neighborhood, the child told WMBD,
“My grandma, my mom, my family might find me in a ditch like he said in the letter.”
While Canton police officers said they would investigate the letter, murder cases and unsolved crimes will take precedence over the case.
“My grandma, my mom, my family might find me in a ditch like he said in the letter.” https://t.co/VnFicbROPr
— WMBD News (@WMBDNews) September 4, 2019
“That’s the problem it’s sitting at the Morton Crime Lab as we speak, but it’s sitting on a backlog,” police spokesman Edward Glad told the news station.
“This is one of those things that will have to wait its turn, unfortunately. Fingerprinting is not an easy thing to do. It takes a while to track down anything in the system that might match up to it,” Glad said.
Meanwhile, Heller is frightened and says she doesn’t know what the world is coming to.
“I just want everything to stop and stop now,” Heller told WMBD.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Canton Police Department at (309)-647-5131 or Canton Crime Stoppers at (309)-647-3636.
