going on. We were all running away.… Someone told me a person was dead. It took a while for the ambulance to get there. People were wailing. Like, really wailing in a way I’ve never heard. It was horrible. It was horrible. It was horrible. I was ten feet away, so I didn’t really see details of the car. It was just sudden movement through the crowd, sound, bodies in the air.… This was a terrorist act. Something that happens in so many places around the world, and it happened here in our little town. It was hard to process that. And the hate—that someone could actively take people’s lives, that’s what their goal was.”
Trooper 1 helped track the neo-Nazi terrorist in his Dodge Challenger, with Jay piloting and Berke surveilling. “The helicopter stayed with the car,” Colonel Flaherty said later. “They followed it and then the sheriff’s department made the stop. We watched that unfold from the downlink.… [Berke] captured an incredible video that shocked us in the command post. He captured that pursuit. That is great evidence.”
Heather Heyer had held firm on her choice to attend the counterprotest, despite her concerns about potential violence, and joined her friends Courtney Commander and Marissa Blair, both fellow paralegals, and Marissa’s fiancé, Marcus Martin. That afternoon, word was relayed to Heather’s mother, Susan Bro, that authorities at a local hospital wanted to speak to Heather’s “next of kin.” Which authorities? Which hospital? Susan didn’t know. She called both hospitals in town, asking about her daughter, and both told her, “We don’t have a patient by that name.”
“That was very frustrating,” Susan told me later. “My son had seen the incident on TV and he called his sister’s phone. A stranger picked up and said they found it on the sidewalk. They didn’t know who his sister was or where she was.”
Susan also called her parents.
“You’d better pray,” she told them, “but the fact they’re asking for next of kin tells me she’s unconscious or worse.”
Susan found the right hospital, the same hospital where she’d given birth to Heather thirty-two years earlier. “I look at so much of her life now, it feels like full circle,” she says. “Where she died is just a few miles from where she was conceived, a few miles from where she was born, a few miles from where she lived when she was killed; it’s all there within a few miles of each other, and yet her death had an impact worldwide.”
Some comfort came that day when Susan asked a detective what her daughter had been doing when she was killed.
“She was with a group of peaceful counterprotesters,” she was told.
Susan was asked if she wanted to come in to see the body and she said, “Not until my husband gets here.” By the time he arrived, Heather’s body had already been taken away to the medical examiner’s office in Richmond.
Susan thought back to her recent meal with Heather at the Wood Grill Buffet on Branchlands Boulevard. “We spent the whole meal talking about social injustice and racism, just life in general, as mothers and daughters often do,” Susan told me. “Every once in a while I would get in a comment. She was just a very animated talker, and talked with her hands a lot. We didn’t talk about the rally coming up.”
They finished and headed out to the car.
“It was so strange, because when we went outside, I remember we hugged harder than usual and we kissed each other on the cheek,” Susan told me. “We were laughing about it, saying, ‘It’s not like we’ll never see each other again, good grief.’ And yet, we never did. We never saw each other again. The next time I saw her was when I identified the body the day before the funeral.”
* * *
I knew, after Heather Heyer’s death, that I had to get to Charlottesville in a hurry. Since Trooper 1 was in use, Fairfax 1, a Fairfax county helicopter, was going to fly me down. I was in the kitchen at home watching when Trump gave his press conference from his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that afternoon. When he said there was hatred, bigotry, and violence “on many sides,” I was outraged—and knew I had to speak up. I immediately had a conference call with my press team.
“I have to hold a press conference,” I said. “Somebody has got to address this. Somebody has to speak for the nation.”
I called Dorothy at