A Chillicothe man was charged on Tuesday with racial intimidation after police report he verbally attacked two black children.
Jeffrey R. Wheeler, 30, of Watt Street, was booked into the county jail on two counts of menacing. Officers wrote in their report that two young African-American children were on Second Street mid-afternoon on Tuesday waiting for their brother to get off the school bus. That’s when, police say, Wheeler came out of a nearby house and started yelling racial profanities at the children to leave the area.
It was reported by police that Wheeler called the children the “N” word on numerous occasions and, according to the report, Wheeler went into his house to “get a gun to blow their brains out.” Wheeler admitted to police that he yelled at the children, but denied saying he was going to get a firearm. Instead, he told police that he went to get a baseball bat.
Neighbors told the Guardian on Wednesday that the man had threatened another man earlier last week and yelled racial slurs at him because of his skin complexion.
A search of Wheeler’s social media pages by the Guardian reveled a strong-liking for the controversial Confederate flag, which some have labeled as a symbolism of racism.
Chillicothe has a long history of racially-motivated attacks.
In 2007, the letters “KKK” were painted on a sign marking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. In February 2009, a 3-foot-by-3-foot swastika was painted on the side of a house; later that month, racial slurs, a depiction of a lynching, and a Confederate flag were spray painted in Strawser Park. The words “Whites Only” were scrawled beside a bathroom door for more than two weeks until the city was able to get enough money together from a depleted budget to take down the graffiti.
Tom Spetnagel, Jr., who is the Ross County Auditor and the county’s Democratic Party Chairman said that racism should be strongly condemned.
“Racism has no place in the world, and we will not tolerate it on the streets of Chillicothe,” Spetnagel told the Guardian. “This should be dealt with swiftly and should be condemned by everyone, regardless of position or political affiliation.”
Wheeler was charged with two felony charges of ethnic intimidation for the verbal attack. He was also charged with two counts of aggravated menacing for allegedly threatening the children.
Once in jail, Wheeler apologized to several correctional officers for his arrest and told them, “it was how I was raised to think like that,” according to sources inside the jail.