The mother of the woman killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend said she is not interested in hearing from the President because she believes he equated her daughter to white supremacists.
“I’m not talking to the President now,” Susan Bro said Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child, and it’s not that I saw somebody else’s tweets about him. I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. (Heather) Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists.”
Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence in the Virginia city at a news conference earlier this week, drawing an equivalency between white supremacists and neo-Nazis with those protesting them.
Thirty-two-year-old Heyer was killed Saturday when a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters gathered to oppose a “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalist and other right-wing groups. Nineteen others were injured in the incident.
A 20-year-old man from Ohio, James Alex Fields Jr., is charged with second-degree murder in Heyer’s death.
Bro said the White House attempted to reach her repeatedly during her daughter’s Wednesday funeral.
“At first I just missed his calls,” she said. “The call – the first call looked like actually came during the funeral. I didn’t even see that message.”
“There were three more frantic messages from press secretaries throughout the day and I didn’t know why that would have been on Wednesday, and I was home recovering from the exhaustion of the funeral and, so I thought well, I’ll get to him later and then I had more meetings to establish her foundation, so I hadn’t really watched the news until last night,” Bro said.
Messages left with the White House about efforts to contact Bro were not returned Friday, but when asked to respond to her comments, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “our thoughts and prayers continue to be with her and her family.”
The President called Heyer “truly special” in a tweet Tuesday but was criticized for not calling Bro directly to express his condolences.
And Bro says that after seeing the news conference, it’s too late for apologies.
“You can’t wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m not forgiving for that,” she added.
Asked if there was something she wanted to say to the President, Bro said, “Think before you speak.”
CNN’s Athena Jones and Jim Acosta contributed to this report.
