JOSHUA ROBERTS/Reuters
Sometimes Susan Bro sits in her car near Heather Heyer Way, the street in Charlottesville, Virginia, named in honor of her daughter. “I blow kisses to her, have a snack. I say I am eating my lunch with her,” Bro told The Daily Beast.
On Friday—five years to the day that Heyer, 32, was murdered by white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr.—Bro was planning to go to the site where her daughter was struck by Fields’ car, as near to the time it happened on August 12, 2017. While she has been to the street, or driven by it, many times before, this would be the first time Bro has visited the location—on Fourth Street, between Market and Water Streets—on the actual anniversary of her daughter’s death.
Heyer was killed when Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a group of anti-Nazi and anti-white supremacist protesters—Heyer among them—who had gathered to raise their voices against the white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and various militias who had descended on Charlottesville for a Unite the Right rally, organized by Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler.