A far-right hooligan threatened to burn a 17-year-old boy on his way to work before smashing his dad’s car (Picture: Chantelle Lunt / Reuters)
A ‘far-right’ racist threatened to light a teenage boy on fire on his way to work, before smashing his dad’s car when he came to rescue him.
The 17-year-old, from Liverpool, was heading to a train station at around 5.30am on Thursday when a man on a bike started following him and shouting racist abuse.
After becoming wary of the man, who allegedly heckled him with threats to ‘burn hotels and burn Muslims’ before ducking down a side street, the boy called his parents for help.
The boy told Metro: ‘I felt scared being approached by this complete stranger, and after the things he said to me, I knew he wasn’t judging me based on my religion, but simply the colour of my skin.’
By the time his dad came to collect him, the man had vanished from the scene.
Chantelle Lunt is a Labour councillor and founder of Merseyside BLM Alliance (Picture: Getty Images)
But he reappeared on the father’s way home in Halewood, stood still with his bike while pointing ‘gun fingers’ at the car.
When the dad confronted him, the man launched into a tirade, saying: ‘The Muslim kid, I told him I’m gonna burn him, I’m gonna burn all of them, they all need to die.’
He then smashed the rear windows of the car with his bike before the dad drove off.
Chantelle Lunt, the boy’s mother and a Labour member of Knowsley Council, told Metro that for the past week: ‘Most black and brown parents have been ready, we’ve been on high alert.’
‘For the first time that morning, I was actually feeling quite relaxed,’ the co-founder of Merseyside Black Lives Matter added. ‘I wasn’t on high alert because it felt like the danger was going away given what had happened the previous night.’
Just a day before the incident, roughly 25,000 people had joined anti-fascist demonstrations across the UK to take a stand against more than a week of racist riots running rampant nationwide.
The Lunts had been wary of letting their kids out to see friends, or visit Liverpool city centre, as a result of the previous week’s violence.
Chantelle’s son was targeted by a racist just a day after a massive anti-fascist demo in Liverpool (Picture: Shutterstock)
But riding high off the protest they had joined, which saw over 1,000 people from across the community gather to defend an asylum centre on August 7, an early morning commute to work seemed ‘a fairly safe thing to do’.
Such vitriol shattered that moment of relief.
‘I was absolutely terrified, I just froze’, Chantelle said of the moment her son called.
‘This person may live in our community. This person has so much hate in their heart towards people of colour, people who are Muslim. This person is willing to be violent, and this person is a grown man.’
The family has since taken extra precautions to ensure their safety, accompanying their son at all times, dropping him to work, and installing security cameras at their home.
‘Recently it’s just felt like I’ve had to have my dad taking me to train stations and stuff’, the 17-year-old said.
‘I just feel as though it’s kind of a separation between me and the community where there wasn’t before. It’s very hard for me to deal with.
‘I think that I’ll get over it, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I should be experiencing that because of this man who I’m absolutely sure doesn’t represent the views of most people who live in this area.’
Chantelle said: ‘It’s not the first time we’ve suspected that someone’s coming near our home. We’ve had air let out of our tyres.
‘Obviously as a young person, I had a lot of racism in the 90s – really overt racism, people chasing you and attacking you, but that was always people who were my age.
Merseysiders turned out in droves to counter the far-right following weeks of unrest (Picture: EPA)
‘Not saying it wasn’t bad, but that was kind of different to what this is. I’ve never experienced that.
‘I thought we were bringing our son up in a world where we were actually trying to make it better.
‘Up until Thursday, he’d never experienced racism that was anything near what I’d experienced, and that’s one of the most upsetting things.’
A GoFundMe to help with the costs of security and car repair has been set up by Patsy Stevenson, an activist famous for a photo of her arrest at a Sarah Everard vigil in 2021.
On the fundraising page, Patsy said: ‘Nobody should have to deal with this kind of disgusting behavior, but Chantelle deserves the world and I think we should all pull together to give them some relief from this ordeal.’
No arrests have been made, but police are scouring CCTV and appealing for witnesses in search of the man who attacked Chantelle’s son and husband.
Detective Inspector Yoseph Al-Ramadhan said: ‘The victim and his family have understandably been left extremely shaken by this despicable incident, and we are supporting them as our investigation continues.
‘Hate crime will never be tolerated on Merseyside, and we understand the distress and upset that being targeted in this way causes.’
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