Racist letter mailed to family threatens their 8-year-old daughter, Illinois cops say

The family of a biracial girl in Illinois say they received a letter calling her a “nasty black thing” and threatening to kill her, according to police.

Now cops are investigating and ramping up patrols of the child’s neighborhood in Canton, a town in central Illinois.

Leona Heller, the great-grandmother of the 8-year-old girl, said she opened the letter Aug. 23 and immediately cried after reading it, according to WMBD.

“My granddaughter is paranoid,” Heller told the Peoria TV station. “She won’t go off this street and that’s not right.”

The anonymous letter includes an apparent threat against the girl.

“You better keep that nasty black thing under control,” the sender wrote in the letter, according to WMBD. “Otherwise you just might find it in a ditch somewhere. Nothing but garbage ALL OF YOU! Get out of this neighborhood. You are nothing (but) trash. 1st warning.”

Canton police said the letter was “ambiguous but threatening.”

“The Canton Police Department is currently investigating a recent incident where a local family received a letter they perceived as a threat to one of their juvenile family members apparently based on the child’s mixed-race heritage,” according to a news release on Facebook.

Police sent the letter to a forensics lab for evidence and increased their presence in the neighborhood, according to the news release.

“It is the Canton Police Department’s stance that any child in our community, regardless of race, should feel safe in their own neighborhood,” police said in the news release.

But Heller said her great-granddaughter is scared, according to HOI.

“She’s petrified,” Heller told HOI. “That’s why I worry about her, what her fear is.”

This story was originally published September 4, 2019 at 12:48 PM with the headline "Racist letter mailed to family threatens their 8-year-old daughter, Illinois cops say."