Redmond consignment owner burns ‘donated’ KKK robe; closes shop
May 19, 2016, 6:35 PM
A Redmond consignment store owner will close up shop after a man left a bag with a Ku Klux Klan-style robe inside it — after she burns it.
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Leona Coakley-Spring, who owns Rags to Riches, says the robe has “stolen her life,” which is why she decided to burn the garment.
In January, a man purporting to be a customer left a Ku Klux Klan robe at her Redmond consignment shop. The son of the store owner called police to report that he and his mother felt threatened by a white man in his 20s with brown hair.
“He said, ‘Your mother really wants to see these dresses,’” Shane Coakley told KIRO 7 in January. “He kind of opened the bag halfway and showed her the dresses, and she bought those two dresses from him for $30. When he looked at me coming out the back, he saw me coming and scattered out the door.”
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After he left, they looked more carefully at the bag with the dresses and noticed a smaller bag.
“And we open up the bag and there was the KKK uniform with the patches and the hood and a hangman’s noose in the bag,” Coakley said.
“All I could feel was channeling the slaves, what they must have felt when they see this stuff or touch it or whatever,” said store owner Leona Coakley-Spring, her voice breaking. “It just was a horrific experience. I can’t explain that to anybody.”
So horrific, she hasn’t been able to put it behind her. So a friend suggested she burn the robe, which she did earlier this week.
“It kind of felt good to see it burn, to be honest,” she said. “To see it burn was a good deal. To see it burn was better.”
King County prosecutors declined to press charges, determining that there was insufficient evidence to show the bag was an intentional threat. The Seattle Times reported that police interviewed the 25-year-old man said he did not know what was inside and that he was dropping off dresses from the home of his friend’s late mother. Investigators did not find the man’s fingerprints on the bag containing the robe, the Times reported.
KIRO Radio’s “Ron and Don” said they appreciated both the terror that the business owner must have felt and also how the incident could have actually been an accident.
“Typically, if you were going leave a robe like that I would think there was some kind of reason or you would know this person,” Ron Upshaw said. “It is very unfortunate that this happened to her, and I hear her pain, but it doesn’t seem like he did this on purpose.”
“If it’s a hate crime then you bring in full display the KKK outfit with some sort of messaging behind it,” Don O’Neill added. “You don’t hide it and bury it in a bag inside of a bag. It seems accidental.”
Coakley-Spring says she will be selling the store because she no longer feels safe. Upshaw believes that could be an overreaction.
“I can’t tell someone how to feel, but it seems like a stretch to me to go from ‘I was happy and safe in Redmond all these years’ and then all of a sudden this one incident makes me so afraid that I’m going to sell my store,” he said. “That, to me, seems like a little bit of a leap.”
To which O’Neill quipped, “A couple white guys on the radio talking about how African-American women who find KKK robes should feel.”
KIRO 7 contributed to this story.
