BY DONNA SWICEGOOD

Statesville City Councilwoman Doris Allison delivered a message to the community — and the individual who tried to intimidate her — on Monday morning.

“We can’t let evil win,” she said moments before she speaking at a news conference in which she addressed the doll found hanging with a rope around its neck that was placed near one of her campaign signs last week.

Allison, who is running for re-election as the Ward 3 representative this fall, spoke at Alex Cooper Park on Monday morning.

News about the doll, she said, has evoked fear in some members of the community.

“When you get calls — when you get calls from elderly people who are afraid, who lived through the civil rights movement, when you have children calling their parents and talking with their parents and they’re calling me asking me, saying ‘What’s going to happen? Is there going to be a riot? Is there going to be something?’ This is the reason why I’m here,” Allison said.

She said she wants to assure the citizens of Statesville, and in particular Ward 3, that she will not back down.

Allison also spoke directly to those responsible for the act.

“Whatever your intent was, I want to thank you because you made me look deep down inside and see who I am and I had to go deep,” she said. “My emotions were running high, but it’s for the greater good.

“You taught me something about myself. And I think you did with everybody that’s in this city. ‘Who am I?’ And you had the conversation with your children and yourself. This is not what we stand for,” Allison added.

She said the act awakened something inside of her.

“I am a better person right now standing before you than I was last Monday,” she said.

That’s partially due, Allison explained, to the response she received from the community.

“Let’s put our differences aside,” she said. “Let’s become human beings, decent human beings that want to see justice done and set the record straight.”

Allison said she hopes this act will bring people together rather than tear them apart.

“Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream,’ and that dream is a reality for us all. Mother Teresa said, ‘It’s not the great things that I do, but it’s the little things we do in love,’ ” she said.

“I want to share with the public and to the Ward 3 that you’re not forsaken,” she said. “Your concerns still matter. You matter.”

She ended with another message.

”Keep loving each other. Keep supporting each other because hate cannot win.”

Statesville Police Chief David Onley also addressed the ongoing investigation.

On September 15 at 5:30 p.m. officers responded to Wilson Lee Boulevard and Fayetteville Avenue to find the doll hanging with a rope around its neck. Police have narrowed down a timeframe for when the doll was placed. Onley said it is believed the doll was placed sometime between 8:30 and 9 a.m. that day.

“This didn’t happen in the middle of the night, and for that area at that time of morning there’s a lot of traffic that goes through that area on Wilson Lee Boulevard. And somebody had to see something. A lot of this is going to fall back on trying to find the right person that may have drove by, seen somebody, saw a vehicle,” he said.

The police chief said they are looking to find where the doll came from and who may have had contact with the doll, but the investigation is still in its early stages.

Because of the possibility that the doll’s placement was directed at Allison, the SPD reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI came on board, he said, as a tool to assist the SPD.

Related

♦ SPD, FBI investigating after Statesville resident finds doll hanging near city councilwoman’s campaign sign
♦ Allison: ‘This hateful stunt was meant to silence us’