SPRINGFIELD, Ohio —The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

      • MyEdgyAlt@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        Source that they’re pets and not cattle? My farmer friend had a pet cow; they didn’t eat that cow. They ate other cows.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 months ago

          If you read the links I posted, you would see that some of them likely are pets. But go ahead and keep your head buried in the sand. A lot of people ignore or deny things just because they don’t like them.