A dour display depicting police shootings, the Flint water crisis and terrorist bombings is garnering the response a Detroit grandmother who planned it all had hoped for this Halloween.
Larethia Haddon has outdone herself this Halloween after her decoration of a single dummy on her lawn last year prompted a police response, MLive reports.
This year, instead of mere seasonal shock-value, Haddon said she and her grandchildren decided to create a Halloween display themed around issues of violence and tragedy faced throughout the nation and world.
“My grandchildren said ‘Grandma, you’re not afraid of the boogeyman anymore, kids are not afraid of the boogeyman, we’re afraid of what’s going on in the world right now,’” Haddon said in a video interview.
Her grandchildren offered her ideas on different scenes to depict with dummies and decorations that represent current events like highly-publicized police-involved shootings. Haddon said her grandson came up with the idea of a figure with its hands in the air wearing a sign that reads “My Hands Were Up.”
“They’re killing all the fathers and brothers and things like that and we don’t understand what’s going on,” Haddon recalled her grandson saying.
Another group of figures represents a mother kneeling next to her children, which was thought up by Haddon’s oldest granddaughter. She said it’s a testament to the amount of children being abused in the world today.
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“This one touches a lot of people when they come by,” she said.
The downtrodden family is next to a display depicting a carjacking.
“The one that affects me the most is the Flint water,” Haddon says of a bespectacled figure holding a jar of dark-looking water. “I don’t believe anyone should have to live the way the people in Flint are being forced to live.”
The Halloween display also touches on terrorism and bombings.
“The reasons why we came up with this this year, we’re trying to do something positive, instead of just having a dead body laying in the yard, we want to get people to be a little bit more focused on the issues, what’s going on in this world, we need to stick together more, we need to come together, and if we don’t, this scene in my yard is going to be a reality every single day,” she said.
