‘You need to be ran over’ — Garrettsville racism spills into the open
Black Lives Matter protesters have a document full of death threats they have received. Local officials will not support the movement.
By Carter Eugene Adams, Michael Indriolo and Ben Wolford
Read our publisher’s note about this article.
Two weeks ago, a doctoral student was getting gas at the Speedway in Garrettsville when she noticed a man in a white van wearing a Confederate flag mask.
The student is Black. The man was white. And he was staring her down.
Then he screeched out of the gas station, screaming “white power!”
“I don’t want to go outside because I am afraid of what might happen,” said the woman, an international student whose name and other details we are withholding at her request to protect her safety. Her story is corroborated by her host mother, Judy Huehner, who helped her file a report at the Garrettsville Police Department.
This was not the first incident. She has been followed while taking walks, she has been gawked at in stores and she has been taken for Huehner’s health aide. After the Speedway confrontation, she no longer goes outside unless she is with a white person.
“I want to be able to go on walks again, to go to the post office without needing someone to go with me,” she said.
After nearly three months of Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Garrettsville, sometimes attended by a solitary person holding a sign, the village is in the midst of a reckoning over whether racism exists in the areas of northeastern Portage County. Though casual slurs and outright bigotry are common across Portage County and, according to protesters, in Garrettsville, local officials say they have not noticed a problem.
But multiple interviews and a review of comments on social media reveal the urgency and danger of the situation. Organizers of the protest have an entire file of the death threats they have received. And racists have taken refuge in numbers on social media. “Yeah black lives don’t matter sorry not sorry,” one Garrettsville man wrote.
“People have been saying, ‘You guys deserve to be run over’ and ‘There’s just enough of you to use an entire clip’ and stuff like that,” said Sasha Gough, 24, of Garrettsville, who organizes the protests.
“Since the protests have started to receive counterprotesters, we’ve become a little bit more public with how disgusting Garrettsville can get. A lot of people don’t like to hear that. So we started to hear threats, such as, ‘You’ll find yourself on a milk carton’ or ‘You will get chopped up and thrown over the bridge.’”
In an interview, Mayor Rick Patrick said he was “not crazy about” the Black Lives Matter protests but said he has been in contact with them. On the advice of his lawyer, he has not made any statement about racism because any statement he makes could be “twisted” out of context.
“I’m not really saying there is [racism], I’m just saying it’s possible that there is,” Patrick said. “I don’t know exactly who. It could be one person or it could be 100 people, but I just don’t know of any.”
When asked about the racist profanities that motorists and others have hurled at the Black Lives Matter protesters, Patrick said the protesters should not react with their own profanities or yell in response. He said he has received reports from residents that the Black Lives Matter protesters are disturbing the downtown businesses.
“I’ve been a mayor for over eight years, and you don’t think I’ve had things yelled at me over the last eight years?” he said. “I would love to just belt out and say what I really feel sometimes, but I feel as a public official, I can’t do that. You gotta have some restraint. You know, if you’re gonna be out there protesting you better be able to put your big boy panties on and be able to take it and not dish it back out because it’s only going to make it worse for both of them.”
A barrage of violent threats
George Floyd was murdered on May 25. Eight days later, the near-universal fury over the killing reached Garrettsville’s Main Street, where Gough rounded up a handful of people to start a conversation about race in the village.
“I can’t remember a time in my life where something has happened where we’re all protesting for the same thing,” she told the Record-Courier at the time. “It was a really positive experience for the most part.”
That has all changed in the last few weeks. The persistence of racial justice campaigning and the fact that sporadic vandalism accompanied some Black Lives Matter protests has tarred the movement among some Republicans and the far-right.
Even as the number of protesters in Garrettsville remained low, often just one person, counterprotesters began to arrive across the street to show their disapproval of Black Lives Matter. They claim that the protesters are Marxists and that their small rallies on the sidewalk will inevitably descend into violence.
In particular, they said arguments between protesters and people at Garrett’s Mill and Brewing Company were hurting the restaurant. Subsequently, the counterprotesters have made the establishment their de facto headquarters, particularly on Thursday afternoons when the Black Lives Matter protesters gather next door on the sidewalk in front of The Village Bookstore.
Garrettsville residents began writing to local officials, asking what could be done to prevent or relocate the protests. And then threats of violence began to appear on social media.
“I’m locked and loaded for all your asses.”
“I’ll let you live to see another day.”
“You need to be ran over.”
“It’s almost like you want to be found on a milk carton.”
“Everyone in Garrettsville who isn’t a Marxist pig needs to get their CCW [concealed carry weapon] asap. Protect your town.”
Garrettsville Police Chief Tim Christopher said the department has not received any reports of death threats against the protesters. But he said the Black Lives Matter protests did not require any police presence until the counterprotesters began to attend.
“When it was just the BLMs that were there, we spoke with them and we pretty much were having them police themselves,” he said. “And then once we had the All Lives Matter, ALM, started showing up, we increased our presence and were just monitoring the situation from a distance. And then the second week that the ALMs were there, we brought in some extra officers and were monitoring it. … And then this past week [Aug. 13], we even actually brought in additional officers and the officer presence was more prevalent last week.”
Gough said the threats are taking a deep personal toll.
“I double check, triple check, the doors to make sure that they’re all locked. I hate being home alone,” she said. “I don’t feel comfortable going on my porch alone. … As I’m trying to fight this fight, my mental health is tanking because I’m paranoid. I’m constantly looking over my back, and I don’t like having my back to the road for any longer than a few seconds because I don’t know who’s driving by.”
In interviews and in reviews of social media posts, no Black Lives Matter protester or anyone sympathetic to their efforts has made similar violent threats. But they have used the f-word.
Calls for unity, pleas for recognition
Among those debating in earnest, two camps have emerged in Portage County and across the nation: those who want unity and deny that systemic racism exists, and those who say racism is structural and pervasive, many of them bearing personal scars to prove it.
“As we sit here or stand here, my neighbors are going by,” said Judy Heuhner, the Garrettsville resident who hosts the international student. “Two weeks ago one of them spit out of his car window at me. And his kids ate at my house. His kids were in band.”
The problems did not begin with the protests, however.
Brandon Pesicek grew up in Garrettsville and graduated from James A. Garfield High School. His involvement with the anti-racism movement has destroyed his relationship with this family, who believe Black Lives Matter peddles hate, division and communism.
“I work with a lot of the college kids [from Hiram],” he said. “I do landscaping, so we get a lot of student workers, and the things that they tell me are just absolutely depressing. Even in Hiram, they don’t want to go outside. Let alone come here. … The ideology here is, I don’t even want to say old school. It’s barbaric.”
Gough, who is Black, was once called a good Black by a classmate at Garfield.
“Since high school, I’ve been called the n-word,” she said. “I’ve had to tolerate people making very gross jokes at me. You know, just things that I’ve had to deal with. I’ve known for a long time. But I think a lot of other people are finally starting to see, as they’re standing out there trying to have a conversation with us about why they’re out there for BLM and someone drives by and says you’re a bunch of n– lovers.”
The counterprotesters and their supporters, meanwhile, say they are trying to remove the focus on race from the national dialogue. Many of them believe the Black Lives Matter supporters are themselves racist. They have also furthered several false claims that the protesters are from out of town, that they are communists or that they are funneling money to the Democratic Party.
Above all, they just want the protesters to go home. Several people complained that they are tired of seeing them on the sidewalk while driving home from work.
“They’re just constantly hassling people,” said Troy Centric, a Windham resident who attended the counterprotest Thursday. He said one of the protesters directed slurs about “inbred hillbillies” at him.
“And enough’s enough. We were willing to step down. And they refused to step down. All lives matter to us. We’re not about hate, we’re about peace.”
Another counterprotester, Jason Stottlemire, of Garrettsville, said he’s not racist and is tired of being labeled as such.
“This town was not founded at all with racism,” he said. “We’re a farm, hick town, there’s going to be assholes that call people names. People call me names. I have a biracial daughter at home. I get called names, too.
“There ain’t a single person I know that promotes racism. There’s no pro-racists, so why are we classified as such?”
Garrettsville officials choose not to respond
Across Portage County, elected officials, school districts and other institutions have declared racism a threat to public health and education.
The superintendent of Ravenna schools said he believed “all lives cannot matter until Black lives matter.”
The Mental Health and Recovery Board of Portage County said, “Eradicating racism deserves action from all levels of government and society.”
Hiram Village Council also declared racism a public health crisis at its Aug. 11 meeting.
Meanwhile, James A. Garfield School District has not publicly condemned racism or announced any steps, though it is not alone among rural Portage County school districts in largely ignoring the racial justice movement of the last three months.
Patrick, the Garrettsville mayor, said he isn’t willing to support the movement because he has been disappointed with the Black Lives Matter protesters’ behavior, saying they have boycotted local businesses and implied that he and the Village Council are racist.
“I do not want racism here,” he said. “My daughter’s engaged to an African American. I have relatives that are African American. I don’t feel I’m racist, but I’ve been portrayed. And that’s what irritates me because Black Lives Matter aren’t playing fair…
“I was real close to making some comments, but then they started running their mouth and accusing our council and me of being racist. … They’re going to twist my words no matter what I say.”
Portage County Commissioner Kathleen Clyde attended school in Garrettsville in the 1990s and has lived there more recently while in college. She said she had a positive experience but couldn’t speak for minority students.
“I think racism exists everywhere, and something we need to look internally at are ways to help each other,” she said. “Look inward at your own implicit biases and think through them and do better and treat people respectfully, the way you want your family and you to be treated.”
She said she wasn’t aware of the current protests in Garrettsville but said other local Black Lives Matter demonstrations have been peaceful.
“I’ve participated in protests and have been supportive of them,” she said. “The protests I’ve attended have been peaceful, had often mostly been white participants and I feel are people seeking solidarity with Black Americans. Our country has a long history of peaceful protests, and that’s what the Black Lives Matter movement fits into.
“It’s about Black people seeking justice and equality. Their economic opportunity [has been] determined by their skin. Healthcare outcomes and many other facets of everyday life have been broken down because of race.”
At various points, both the Black Lives Matter protesters and some of the counterprotesters have said they would like the other side to be willing to sit down and talk. It would require a phone call or an email.
Click here to receive The Portager in your inbox
We’re the only locally owned news source covering Portage County, Ohio. Our mission is to help our community thrive. You can help us grow.
