MARYLAND
WJLA
by Richard Reeve/ABC7
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (ABC7) —
For Phillip Butler and his wife Barbara, it began with a neighbor’s phone call.
“Told me there was a cross,” he recalls. “I don’t know if it was smoking or burning, I don’t know which one it was, in our front yard.”
The Butlers say since that summer night in 1977, they’ve never forgotten the sight of the 6-to-7 foot cross, wrapped in rags, reeking of flammable fluid.
“I’d never seen a cross,” Barbara Butler told reporters. “You see something like on television or something like that, but to really have one in your yard… is there that much hatred in your heart?”
Her husband says as he took down the cross, before calling the police, his mind was ticking.
“Someone is against us,” he remembers thinking. “What did we do to put the cross in our yard?”
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