Susan Bro, the mother of Heather D. Heyer, the counterprotester who was murdered during the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, riots, said Friday she was “not surprised” former Vice President Joseph R. Biden decided to use that “defining moment” to announce his presidency.
“I guess I’m not surprised. I guess that Charlottesville has been a defining moment for a lot of people. I don’t think he’s been here. I don’t think he’s been in town. It was just sort of a feeling of ’here we go again,’ ” she said in an interview with CNN’s “New Day” show
Ms. Bro said Mr. Biden did not call her prior to his announcement but called her late Thursday evening. She said they discussed losing their children (Mr. Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident and his son to brain cancer) and how him bringing up the Charlottesville riots was “traumatizing” for people who were there.
“I think it was traumatizing for some other people in Charlottesville to see it show up again on the screen and I did tell him that, that it triggered some other people,” she said, adding the events have “to be part of the political dialogue.”
Mr. Biden’s announcement video centered around the riots to criticize President Trump’s response at the time, where the president said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those who had the courage to stand against it, and in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike anything I had seen in this lifetime,” Mr. Biden said in the video.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” he added.
While Mr. Biden mentioned a “brave, young woman lost her life,” he didn’t use Heyer’s name specifically.
James Alex Fields Jr., a Nazi sympathizer, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, fatally running over Heyer. He pleaded guilty to 29 federal charges, including first-degree murder and one count of a hate crime resulting in death.
When asked about pursuing the death penalty in March, Ms. Bro said, “There’s no point in killing him. It would not bring back Heather.”
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
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