This one has a real Jussie Smollett feel to it. A biracial woman in Madison, Wisconsin claims 4 white men came up to her, shouted racial slurs, and then set her on fire. She then casually drove home, waited hours to go to the hospital, and waited even longer to file a police report over the phone. Maybe this really did happen, but for some reason stories like this almost always end up being hoaxes.
CNN reports:
Madison police and the FBI have launched a hate crime investigation after an 18-year-old biracial woman was set on fire.
The assault took place early Wednesday morning when the woman was driving and stopped at a red light and “heard someone yell out a racial epithet,” according to a police incident report.
The woman is not named in the report, but a family spokesperson identified her as Althea Bernstein, a college student and a volunteer EMT.
“She looked and saw four men, all white. She says one used a spray bottle to deploy a liquid on her face and neck, and then threw a flaming lighter at her, causing the liquid to ignite,” read the report, which was filed over the phone.
It already smells a little fishy, but then there’s this rotting carp to make it stink to high hell:
Bernstein then “patted out the flames, and eventually drove home,” the report said. “Her mother encouraged her to go to a hospital.”
Later on Wednesday, Bernstein called 911 to report the incident, according to Michael Johnson, the family spokesperson and president and CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Dane County.
Plus there’s this picture of the alleged burns she suffered:
Weird. Her face and neck were on fire and yet her hair didn’t even get singed.
There’s a lot of things that don’t add up here, but the Madison Police Department doesn’t seem to care:
“Our department believes victims, and we take their statement and then thoroughly investigate what they said happened to them. We believe this victim,” said department spokesman Joel DeSpain.
And Madison’s mayor is all in on this story:
“While we are still learning more about the details, current information suggests this may have been a premeditated crime targeted toward people of color, which makes the incident even more disturbing. I immediately reached out to the police when I learned of the incident, asking them to use all available resources to pursue the perpetrators as quickly as possible,” said mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.
Bernstein even got a call of support from Meghan Markle. Yea!
We are asked to believe that there was this roving gang of white guys with flammable liquid and a lighter hoping that a black person would randomly get caught at a stoplight so they could commit racist immolation. Then we are asked to believe that it never occurred to the “victim” to call the police after being set on fire by 4 white guys shouting racism slurs. After that we are asked to believe that Bernstein is an 18-year-old EMT and yet couldn’t diagnose her wounds as hospital-worthy. Finally we are asked to believe that this special racist fire burns skin but not hair.
Interestingly enough, just a day before this alleged hate crime happened, Black Lives Matter protesters in Madison tore down the statue of an abolitionist and then beat the crap out of a gay progressive state senator. On the off chance that Althea Bernstein really was set on fire, the smart money says it was white “anti-racist” BLM protesters who did it.
