Be warned: This is another hate crime story!
S.C. MAYOR SAYS ‘YELLOW STICKY SUBSTANCE’ ON HER CAR WAS SPRAYED BY VANDALS, POLICE SAY IT’S JUST POLLEN
The mayor of a South Carolina town believed she was the target of a hate crime after cars belonging to her and her husband were dusted with a mysterious, “yellow, sticky substance.”
Local and state police investigated the claims made by Lamar Mayor Darnell Byrd McPherson, who reported that on February 7 at 10 p.m. local time, someone sprayed her 2017 Symphony Silver Hyundai Elantra Sport and her husband’s soft-top 1998 Buick Roadmaster with a residue outside of their home.
The material, she remembered, “got in all of the grooves” of her husband’s gray sedan.
The mayor had recently returned to her home from a meeting in the larger city of Hartsville, about 22 miles north of Lamar.
“My husband went out to the car to get some things out of the garage,” she told Newsweek. “He says, ‘Somebody’s painted your car!’”
She recalled that the couple’s neighbor, who had stopped by in his van to pick up some laundry, also chimed in.
“Darnell, there’s something on your car,” she remembered him saying. “They started rubbing it, and it was this yellow, sticky substance. So it was like, What is this?”
She said her husband and the neighbor “started scraping all over” their cars to rid what she described as a “grainy substance” akin to industrial spray foam used to patch concrete.
“It looked like little pebbles,” she added.
Setting in was the deafening fear of an attack.
“I likened it as a hate crime because No. 1, there’s a history in our town of Lamar,” the volunteer mayor of the town with approximately 980 constituents, said.
In the 1970s, racist acts were not uncommon in Lamar, where the mayor said burning crosses was once a pastime.
According to a New York Times article dated March 4, 1970, an estimated 200 vigilante white men wielding ax handles, chains and stones—charged three school buses carrying black children, and prevented them from heading to attend newly segregated schools. Many of the kids were injured by smashed bus window glass.
Once the buses were emptied, the mob tipped two of them over before state police were able to restore order.
“If the safety of our children is not sacred to all men, then the entire process of law and government is meaningless,” Governor Robert E. McNair declared afterward.
The memories of the past were front and center for Mayor McPherson upon seeing her car defaced.
“It ignited some fear in my spirit,” she said. “My God, who would do that?
“It was something; it was just unnerving to me.”
https://www.newsweek.com/darnell-byr...-spray-1349289