From CityNews Toronto:
August 18, 2013
A family is in shock and a community has united after an anonymous hate letter was written about a young boy living with severe autism.Karla Begley told CityNews her son Max, 13, stays with his grandmother in the morning during the summer time. It was at that home in Newcastle where letter was delivered on Friday.
“I was shaking when I was reading it,” Brenda Millson, Max’s grandmother, told CityNews. “It’s awful words. You don’t know why somebody would ever do such a thing.”
The typed, one-page letter refers to the young boy as a “nuisance” and a “wild animal” before suggesting the family move or “euthanize” the child.
Begley says the police have been contacted and should they have grounds, charges will be filed against the letter’s author.
According to @lennonandmaisy, this is the letter in the newstory:
I cannot accurately imagine the amount of intense stress and fear this letter has likely caused the family. They do not know who sent it to them, so there might be a constant fear of someone coming to their home at any moment to do something terrible, or that any public place they go, they could be standing next to the person who did this.
As a kid growing up in a non-diverse suburb of the MidWest, I constantly received many hateful threats for being Asian-American and it took a huge emotional toll on me. But, at least in my case, people wished I would “go back to China”*, but didn’t wish I would be euthanized. If what I went through was painful, I would think this would be even more intense. When you’re a target like this, it’s not just about the words themselves. You know that you are almost constantly being watched and scrutinized for doing even the most normal, everyday things because you are different. You can’t even escape the injustices of the world in your own home.
This is absolutely dreadful. My heart goes out to the family and I have a lot of respect for the mother for speaking out against this deep and unjustified hate. There is video of her speaking in the CityNews post.
I am very happy to see that it seems that the majority of the neighborhood has come together to support them, which is very important.
I hope they can find and bring to justice the person who did this. It may bring some sense of relief to the family to not be constantly worried. I hope the person responsible for this gets mental treatment and/or punishment and that they don’t do this again.
*I’m not Chinese or Chinese-American.