Woman who sparked rumors of Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio never expected it to reach presidential stage

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Social media has recently been filled with memes of pets arming themselves from the alleged threat of migrants in the Springfield, Ohio, area.

Now, according to the Daily Mail , the woman who sparked these rumors of Haitian migrants eating pets is filled with regret and says she never intended to target the Haitian community.

The rumors started after 35-year-old Erika Lee posted in a Facebook group that her daughter’s friend lost her cat’, only to find the pet strung up ‘from a branch’ outside the home of a Haitian family.

Panic spread across social media after the news outlet said screenshots of Lee’s warning stated that Haitian migrants were hanging cats ‘From a branch like you’d do a deer for butchering, and they were carving it up to eat.’

‘I’ve been told they are doing this to dogs; they have been doing it at Snyder Park with the ducks and geese,’ she continued, claiming to have been ‘told that last bit by rangers and police.’

‘Please keep a close eye on these animals.’ were quickly circulated on X.

Vice President nominee JD Vance mentioned the rumor on his X account , which former President Donald Trump then reiterated in the presidential debate in front of 67 million viewers.

Daily Mail reports that conservatives saw the post and attributed it to another story of a Canton woman stomping a cat’s head and eating it on Facebook Live to the Haitian migrant community.

Lee told NBC News that it exploded into something that she didn’t mean to happen.

She tells news sources that she never expected her post to ‘get past Springfield’, and and has since deleted the post as she did not anticipate it sparking a national rumor.

Lee admitted to Newsguard that she had no firsthand knowledge of the claims. Her neighbor, Kimberly Newton, has also confirmed that she did not hear the story from her daughter but from an acq

‘I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,’ she told NewsGuard , a company that counters misinformation. ‘I don’t have any proof.’

It seems to be a case of hearsay gone very wrong, with the cat owner being ‘an acquaintance of a friend’ from a friend who heard it from a source before it was told to Lee, who posted it online.

According to the Daily Mail, the police insisted that no reports have been filed over pets being eaten, but before the back and forth was resolved the rumor went viral.

Springfield officials released a statement, “‘In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.’

According to Daily Mail, aside from her 15 minutes of fame, Lee says she hasn’t ‘really been following the news much on it at all.’

She told the news outlet that all she was trying to do was inform people and wasn’t saying ‘Haitians as a whole [are] bad.’

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