SPRINGFIELD, Ohio —The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

    • MyEdgyAlt@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      Source that they’re pets and not cattle? My farmer friend had a pet cow; they didn’t eat that cow. They ate other cows.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        If you read the links I posted, you would see that some of them likely are pets. But go ahead and keep your head buried in the sand. A lot of people ignore or deny things just because they don’t like them.