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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      64 days ago

      All she wanted was a simple lynching of some “undesirables” by other people and no repercussions for herself.

      Is that too much to ask?

      /s

      • @person420
        link
        34 days ago

        They’re not hurting the people they need to be hurting.