“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
The woman behind a Facebook post that eventually catapulted the subject into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating the local pets.
- Erika Lee had posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor said she thought the cat was a victim of her Haitian neighbors.
- That neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party.
- Newton says that Erika Lee misstated her story, that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend.
Lee now says she never imagined her Facebook post would turn into hate, division, and threats against the Haitian community, and is now filled with regret and fear.
“I’m not a racist,” she said through heavy emotion, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”
Lee said she pulled her daughter out of school and is now worried about her safety with so much attention on her family. She is also concerned for the safety of the Haitian community, which she said she did not intend to villainize en masse.
Other posts have contributed to misinformation, causing an attack on Haitian immigrants.
There was a video of a woman who had allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat, but that woman was from Canton, Ohio, not Springfield.
There was also a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio. This also is a wild goose chase.
The Ohio Division of Wildlife tells TMZ the real deal behind the viral pic — the guy was actually picking up 2 geese that were hit in a Columbus car accident. The county’s wildlife office says you usually need a statement from the sheriff or wildlife division to claim roadkill, but not always, particularly if it may be nuisance geese.
