For 11 months, black families in an Atlanta suburb were terrorized with letters from a person claiming to be a white male KKK member who would burn their houses and kill them. Following an extensive investigation, local police charged Terresha Lucas, a black woman, with perpetrating the threats.
The Post-Millennial reports:
Police said that residents of Manning Drive in Georgia began receiving notes in December from a person claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. “Lucas allegedly described herself as a six-feet-tall white male with a long, red beard who did not live in the neighborhood,” the police statement said.
On December 21, residents of two homes on Manning Drive received notes in their mailboxes that Detective Nathan Shumaker described as racially-motivated. He said the notes were dropped in their mailboxes as night, and were discovered the next morning.
“The notes threatened to burn their houses down and kill them and said that they didn’t belong in the neighborhood,” he said.
“Subsequent notes with similar verbiage were placed in residents’ mailboxes on Feb. 17, Feb. 22, March 1 and March 3. After a six-month absence, the final note was placed on Sept. 6. Shumaker said there were likely more notes written,” the police statement said….the notes were received by at least seven black people who lived in the neighborhood. The notes reportedly contained the N-word and talked about hanging people and killing kids…
Detectives … determined that the letters had similar handwriting, tone and verbiage with some “distinctive letters that were consistent throughout.”
On Labor Day, police received evidence linking the notes to the house of Lucas, with detectives being able to obtain a search warrant. Detectives were able to find other evidence linking the suspect to the incidents when they carried out that warrant.
This was a hoax, in the sense that the perpetrator pretended to be a white male to inflame public outrage. Fewer than one in three reported hate crimes is genuine, and most are hoaxes, according to research cited by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, an African-American.
