R&I – FS
The first one came in February 2016 — a magazine subscription under a homophobic fake name. At first, LeeMichael McLean and Bryan Furze tried to ignore it. But then the harassment kept coming.
McLean, 44, called the mail “an insidious way for a harasser to get inside your house.”
“It brought me back to being a little kid and getting teased for my voice or my appearance,” he told USA TODAY. “We were being picked on because we were gay, and it had followed me into my 40s. I couldn’t believe it.”
During more than five years of harassment, about 30 pieces of mail with homophobic names on them were sent to the couple’s home in Massachusetts. But after their community rallied behind them to find suspects, McLean and Furze say handwriting analysis led them to the perpetrator.
Furze, 45, said they feared the hate mail would escalate into something more physical. They worried about when their son would learn to read the harassment himself. And even as they tried not to let it affect their everyday lives, they became scared of checking their mail and being in their own home.
“It was something that was always in the back of our minds, but we had no control over it,” he said. “So we had to tolerate it and live on.”
When they reported the harassment to the police, they say officers took the allegations seriously but there weren’t many clues to lead to a suspect.
The couple spoke with several law enforcement professionals who told them the perpetrators in these cases are usually someone you can see from your house. But all their neighbors were so nice that they began to think it couldn’t possibly be true.
“For five years, we were living here and wondering which of our neighbors, who were all being kind and neighborly to us, is actually harassing us,” McLean said.
Then the perpetrator made a mistake.
The suspect, who has not been publicly identified, signed the couple up for a Boston Globe subscription, but the McLean and Furze already had a subscription. When the newspaper sent back the order request, made under the name “Michelle Fruitzey,” McLean realized it was handwritten.
McLean brought the handwriting sample to the police station and gave a statement, walking through the years of harassment. He quickly realized the stress and anxiety he had been internalizing for years.
“I walked out of there feeling like a foot shorter because I had so much weight on me,” he said. “It was horrible. I was anxious, depressed. Having to recount those details was incredibly painful.”
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Article URL : https://www.yahoo.com/news/gay-couple-faced-harassment-5-133821135.html