A Douglas County woman has been charged with eight counts of making terroristic threats after police say she left a series of racially charged notes in her neighbors’ mailboxes that were both threatening and misleading.
The notes began to appear in the mailboxes of homes on Manning Drive in a Douglasville subdivision called Brookmont in December 2020, Douglasville police said on Facebook. Each of the notes claimed to be written by a white man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and threatened to kill the residents and burn down their homes. The notes described their writer as a 6-foot-tall man with a long, red beard who did not live in the neighborhood.
The suspect ultimately identified by investigators was 30-year-old Terresha Lucas, a Black woman who also lives in the Brookmont community, Douglasville police said. Lucas is expected to surrender to authorities this week, authorities said.
The first two notes were found Dec. 21, 2020, according to Douglasville police. Additional notes described as having “similar handwriting, tone and verbiage” were found Feb. 17, Feb. 22, March 1 and March 3. The notes were left in mailboxes overnight and not discovered until the residents checked their mail.
“By mid-March, we really didn’t have anything to go on,” Douglasville police Detective Nathan Shumaker said.
Shumaker and another detective, Andre Futch, went door to door in the neighborhood to look at doorbell camera footage. The detectives also walked the neighborhood multiple times and handed out flyers to Brookmont residents, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
Months later, on Labor Day, a final note was found, police said. Evidence was discovered that linked the notes to Lucas, though police did not release specific details of how the connection was made.
Investigators were able to get a search warrant for Lucas’ home, where they say they found additional evidence that she was behind the threatening notes.
No information was released about why Lucas was motivated to send the notes.
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