Heather Heyer’s mother sues man who killed her daughter in Charlottesville car attack

The mother of Heather Heyer, who died in 2017 when a car rammed into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., is suing the driver convicted of her murder.

Susan Bro filed a $12 million wrongful death lawsuit against 22-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. on Friday, local newspaper The Daily Progress reported. The suit, filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court, names Fields as the only defendant.

{mosads}“We want to show others that there are serious consequences for actions of hatred and violence,” Bro told the Progress on Wednesday. “This lawsuit is a way to continue to extinguish hatred.”

Bro added that she doesn’t want Fields’s “blood money,” but instead hopes to ensure that he will never profit from selling the rights to his story or publishing a memoir about the events in Charlottesville.

Fields, a self-professed neo-Nazi, is currently serving a prison sentence of life plus an additional 419 years after being convicted in July of first-degree murder and nine counts of malicious wounding over his role in the Charlottesville riots.

In March, Fields pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crime charges and admitted to targeting the crowd of counterprotesters at the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally because of their perceived and actual race, color, national origin and religion, and admitted he intended to kill those he injured.

The car attack happened as white nationalists rallied to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.