Community aids family

People lend support to professor after house set on fire

In response to a fire set at a JMU faculty member's house last week, the JMU and Harrisonburg communities have aided the family by providing alternate housing and raising funds.

The fire started early Monday morning, when a sign at social work professor Cindy Hunter's house was set on fire. The sign gave facts about the war in Iraq that sat on the family's porch.

According to Hunter, there was a candlelight vigil last Monday night in which 70 to 80 people from the community showed up in support of the family.

"There has been so much mobilization around this," Hunter said. "It's so moving to have people come to us who have very different political beliefs, but that still think this is unacceptable."

Sam Nickels, Hunter's husband, said the support from the city shows the "rejection of the inappropriateness" characteristic of Harrisonburg.

Continued support, both on and off campus, has attempted to restore order to the family's everyday life. According to Nickels, hundreds of people have stopped by to give their condolences. Families have dropped off fruit baskets, painters have offered to paint new walls and the JMU ROTC has offered to lend its trucks and manpower to move the family into their temporary home.

Tomorrow, a rally will be held on the steps of the Integrated Science and Technology building at 12:30 p.m. Supporters of the family and their freedom of speech will hold a forum tomorrow night titled, "Is Silence the Price of Freedom?" Both student and faculty speakers will express their views on the fire.

An emergency fund has been set up for Hunter's family. Payments can be made to the Commonwealth One account 515187, or cash and checks can be dropped off at Health and Human Services, room 2126.

"All of the organizing is bigger than us," Hunter said. "It's a community reaction."

Senior Brooke Heffernon, a social work major, said she "questioned how free we really are" and said that the act has shocked much of the JMU campus. "It was unfair for [Hunter's] family to lose their home for exercising their freedom of speech," Heffernon said.

According to Nickels, the Styrofoam art board that was set on fire had simple statistics on it and was placed in their yard at the start of the war in March. On it were the number of Iraqis, American and British soldiers killed since the beginning of the war, and the number of weapons of mass destruction and a flag, all of which continuously were updated.

Hunter said it was a simple expression of her family's First Amendment right to the freedom of speech — it presented no real opinion either way, and the family did not expect any kind of resentment toward its sign. However, since the start of the war, the sign has been torn down twice and their house recently was egged.

"This was an act of a small intolerance within the largely tolerant Harrisonburg community," Nickels said.

Nickels said he never thought that the previous vandalism would become any more than simple ignorance. The family attempted to hinder any further actions by placing the board on its house instead of in its yard. Between 4:30 and 5 a.m., the sign was lit on fire. The board, being laminated, was flammable, and the flames quickly spread up the column it was on. It continued onto the first floor roof, setting the second floor on fire.

All of their second floor possessions, including those of Adama Sow, a West African student going to JMU and living with the family, were lost. Had it not been for the fire alarm, Sow's life would have been lost as well, according to Nickels.

Nickels said he assumed the vandals didn't mean to set the house ablaze, but just had not realized that the destruction of the sign directly would have led to the destruction of the entire second story. With the quick aid of the Harrisonburg Fire Department, the blaze was quelled within two hours, according to Nickels, and much of the family's possessions on the first floor were salvageable.

Hunter said she was told police were going to prosecute to the fullest degree and were investigating. "It's not like somebody dropped an ID card in the lawn as they were running away," she said, explaining that she was hopeful, but that she understood there was little evidence.