JACKSON – Kiara Williams has lived in the township for a little over a year now but she never thought she would wake up to being the victim of a bias incident.
Williams discovered her BMW had been keyed with the “N” word dug into the side of it on the morning of Aug. 3. She said her vehicle was “skeleton keyed in the door with a X under it. Three tires flattened. My landlord is black and says he’s getting threatening calls. This is crazy.”
She told The Jackson Times that “I woke up and was getting ready for work and a neighbor knocked on my door and told me that her husband had seen trash and scratches on my car. I went outside to see what she was talking about and there was trash on my car and it was keyed.”
Beyond the “N” word another word was carved into it, “marked.”
“The side of the door had a skeleton with an X underneath it. The front window had a gash in it. It looked like they were trying to puncture it with something but they made a gash and couldn’t break it,” Williams said.
“These are special tires so they don’t go all the way flat and they get to where you need to go if you do have a flat tire and you can see in the tire that there were a couple punctures in the tire that look like that they used a knife or something. I guess they noticed it wasn’t going all the way flat so they kept trying to puncture it a few times,” Williams said.
Williams said they took a light out of her car. “It was just a mess. I don’t know who did it. I mind my business. I go to work and I come home and stay in the house. None of the neighbors had seen anything. So far no one has said they had seen anything.”
She added, “I do have ring camera (on the front of her home) but whoever did this knew that I live where I live because my parking space does not have the numbers of my house on it.”
Williams filed a police report and knocked on some doors but no one had reported seeing anything. Township Police are continuing their investigation into the bias/criminal mischief incident and are asking anyone with information about the incident to contact Jackson Police Detective Ed Howe at 732-928-1111 or provide the information through the department’s Stop It app.
Police responded to the incident around 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 3. Williams’ residence is located on Daisy Court in the 60 Acres development. Upon arriving, the officers observed the damage to William’s 2011 BMW. As Williams had concluded it appeared that the suspect(s) had used an object to scratch the paint in multiple places on the car including what appeared to be a skull and also a derogatory, racist remark which was scratched into the paint on the trunk lid near the vehicle’s emblem.
Police believe that the incident took place where the vehicle was parked between the hours of 7 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 2 and 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 3 when Williams’ neighbor notified her.
While township police officers were on the scene conducting the investigation, the victim’s landlord met and spoke with the officers and they listened to a voice mail which was reportedly left by an area resident alleging that there was illegal activity at the victim’s residence and that the landlord should do something about it before the police do.
Williams said, “a neighbor did come to my house to tell me that the day before when I let my son play outside he was playing with his son and some other kids and one of the kids came up to his son and said ‘we’re sorry we can’t play with you kids anymore because we aren’t allowed to play around the black kids.’”
She added that her landlord had come over and told her “that he had been getting threatening calls since June. He had not once told me that but was telling me this now.” Her landlord is also black and Williams said the nature of those threats were to get any black residents out of the neighborhood.
As to the damage to Williams’ car, “with my policy vandalism wasn’t covered but thank God someone actually reached out to me from seeing what happened on Facebook and were willing to help me out in the meantime and hopefully I can get a good enough price given that they can help.”
“You never think something like this is going to happen to you. You see it all the time in the news and you read about it but you never think it is going to be you,” she said.
