Advertisement
The words hit Christina Wevley so hard they churned her stomach. About 20 computer-printed flyers were strewn about her porch and front yard Tuesday night near Second Street and Mankato Avenue.
A friend flagged down a police officer.
At 7:15 a.m., after little sleep, Wevley found another 15 notes with the same ugly words in the rear of her home. One was taped to her garage door. She called police.
The notes brim with racial hate and include threats that the perpetrators would kill her and her children if they don’t leave the neighborhood. She handed them over to police.
“It took my breath away and it made my stomach so sick,” she said. “And to find more this morning? I was just bawling.”
She looked up and down the street wondering who it was.
“The town should be aware that there are people out there with problems and racial issues,” Wevley said. “My biggest concern is I’m the only one here with my two kids.”
The 26-year-old single white mother and her two black sons moved to the neighborhood a month ago from Fairway Woods, an apartment complex two miles south. Richard, 4, and Andre, 3, giggled and played on the porch, too young to understand the threat and their mother’s emerging nightmare.
Wevley grew up in San Diego and came to Winona briefly in 1997. She returned in 1999.
The racism is not new to her but its severity is, Wevley said.
She’s felt racism before in Winona, she said, but was not prepared for direct threats in writing.
“I’ve never dealt with this ever,” she said. “What can I do if there’s no one to help me?”
Wevley’s brother-in-law, Manny Allen, who is black, first saw the notes Tuesday night and warned her.
As Allen tried explaining what happened, his anger boiled over.
“What do you do? This is ridiculous. I don’t know what to say about it. This is America. There is no black and white,” he said. “This ain’t Winona anymore. This is Mississippi. What is color? The grass is color. The dirt is color.
“Now I got to figure out who's doing it. I don’t want to move back to the ghetto to feel safe. They’re not going to run me out of here either.”
Allen, 35, is from Philadelphia and lives in a downtown Winona apartment. He often visits Wevley and his two nephews. When he found the notes Tuesday night, he placed them on all the cars in the neighborhood, driven by anger. Police officers removed them.
Police Chief Frank Pomeroy sent three officers Wednesday to the neighborhood to knock on doors, gather information and patrol the area.
“Obviously we’re not going to put up with this kind of crap,” Pomeroy said. “I don’t know who’s behind it. It appears that you’ve got somebody who is ignorant and prejudiced and needs to be stopped and we will do everything that we can do to stop them.”
Pomeroy said reported hate crimes are so rare in Winona, he remembers only a “handful” in his 20 years as chief.
The most prominent was a cross-burning Sept. 6, 1995, just before 2 a.m. in a yard near Hamilton and East Third streets — five blocks west of Tuesday’s hate crime. The wooden cross was set on fire in the yard of a white woman with a black child and a black boyfriend.
The race hate leaflets constitute a hate crime, or what criminal justice officials in Minnesota categorize as a “bias-motivated crime,” Pomeroy said.
Hate Crime at a glance
Hate crimes in Winona: From 1994 to 2004, Winona had 13 reported racial hate crimes, including a 1995 cross burning on the yard of a black family.
Statewide: There was a 12 percent increase in hate crimes from 2003 to 2004, and the number of victims increased 18 percent. Race bias accounted for two of every three hate crimes in 2004. State law requires police to report every hate crime, defined by the officers’ judgment and/or the victim’s opinion.
What is a hate crime? Any crime where the offender was motivated to act by the victim’s race, religion, national origin, sex, age and disability, or sexual orientation. It could be theft, rape, assault, vandalism or crime.
Sources: Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minnesota Statutes, Winona Daily News.
Reporter Jeff Dankert can be reached at (507) 453-3513, or e-mail: jdankert@winonadailynews.com.
