Vocal critics of embattled Mayor Tiffany Henyard believe bullets rained down on her home on her orders during a bitter feud between the two sides last summer. .
Last July, two cars belonging to tenants of former Dolton Village Trustee Valeria Stubbs, a former Cook County Sheriff’s Office employee, were struck by at least nine shots.
The raid stemmed from a public attack on Henyard, who is accused of plundering from the coffers of a debt-ridden Illinois town to pay for lavish trips, dinners and personal luxuries. That’s what she believes.
Asked if he believed Henyard, 40, was behind the shooting, Stubbs did not hesitate.
“That’s right,” she told the Post.
Stubbs said Henyard had made several personal threats at his home before the incident, the first time being during a snowstorm last winter.
At the time, Stubbs accused the mayor of hiring a registered sex offender as a village law enforcement officer and publicly called for his removal from the position.
Henyard and her team did not respond to requests for comment from The Post on Monday.
Shortly after, Henyard posted a bizarre video of himself shoveling snow from Stubbs’ driveway.
“This is what happens when you corner people you don’t like,” Henyard says with a smile. “Guess what? I’m there for all my haters. It doesn’t matter, because I’m the mayor of all of Dalton, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And Even things that are abominable.”
Mr. Stubbs, clearly confused, emerges from his home and appears briefly on camera. Henyard said she told others she had called the village to have the snow removed.
“I never called her to come,” she explained. “She was just harassing me. I went to her next board meeting and told her to stop telling her lies.”
Months later, after a recall effort Stubbs helped organize failed, Henyard again led an intimidating “caravan of police and city officials” to her property, the retired deputy said. Told.
“Even though I wasn’t home, they rang my doorbell and all the tenants and asked where I was,” she said. “They called me and said there were a lot of people outside. I called Henyard and they didn’t answer.”
Stubbs appeared before the board again and confronted the mayor in a public comment session.
“I wanted to document that this woman was coming to my house and harassing me,” she said. “I told her that under no circumstances should she ever come to her house again.
Two months later, Stubbs woke up around 6:30 a.m. to the sound of gunfire. She went outside and she consoled an upset bystander of hers who was waiting for a bus nearby at the time.
Stubbs then went to the back of the house and saw two of the tenants’ cars shot and bullet holes and shell casings on the ground.
Video recorded by a neighbor’s Buabel camera captured the shooting, showing two men running from the scene, jumping into a white car and driving away, screeching.
Ms Stubbs said she believed Henyard was behind the incident.
She reported the shooting to local police, who she said were staffed by the mayor’s supporters.
“They refused to give me a police report,” she said. “And we haven’t heard anything since. We don’t trust the police here.”
Mr Stubbs said the neighbors were so scared that they now told each other where they were going and told neighbors when they returned home.
Henyard, co-owner of a failing burger joint, dresses up as the fictional drug lord Nino Brown from the 1991 crime film New Jack City at board meetings and has a DJ playing Rihanna’s “Bitch”. He suddenly came into the limelight for his antics as mayor, such as doing things like “Better Have My Money” is in litigation.
Critics claim she runs a fiefdom of terror, stripping licenses from businesses that refuse to donate to the safe and using local law enforcement as a personal force of intimidation.
Due in part to Henyard’s spending habits, the town of 20,000 people is now millions of dollars in debt. Some say the mismanagement is so bad that Dalton’s police cruisers are on the verge of being repossessed for unpaid bills.
Stubbs said she is now watching over the town and hoping that someday the pleas for help from the struggling village will be heeded.
“I just want to see justice served,” Stubbs said.
