MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Disturbing video shows what appears to be two young people throwing Molotov cocktails into a Tennessee home as a woman and two young children slept inside.
Now she’s calling for help and for those responsible to be held accountable.
Surveillance video shows two people, possibly teens, setting something on fire before throwing it at the home, smashing through windows.
Vanessa Luellen, 70, said she was in bed with her 1-year-old grandchild, and another young child was also at the home at the time.
“All of a sudden, I hear, like, a boom. I thought the child had fallen out the bed, but it was them throwing a fire bomb,” she said. “The fire was blazing all up in the window. We [were] trying to get up and run. I got glass in my feet, and we went on and got out.”
She said the initial attack happened at the end of May but that she was targeted a second time.
At the beginning of June, the Memphis Fire Department cited arson as the cause, saying two Molotov cocktails were thrown through windows.
“The inside of the house was full of gasoline and all types of fuel on the floor,” Luellen said.
She said she can no longer live in the home where she was born and raised, as the windows are now boarded up.
“We, as older people, have been there all our lives. These little boys can’t be more than 18 or 19 years old,” Luellen said.
She said she doesn’t know why she was targeted.
“And for what, I don’t know. That’s the question. I haven’t done anything to anybody, so why are you attacking me?” she said. “I work in the neighborhood trying to make it better, but that’s no cause for you to do that. You’re trying to kill, not only me but little, bitty babies. What has a 1-year-old done to you?”
With the windows around her home boarded up and the damage inside totaling thousands of dollars, she’s asking people with any information to step up and call local authorities.
“My thing is, if they done it to me and get away with it, they’re going to do it to somebody else because they’re going to feel as though, ‘We can get away with this,'” she said. “You can’t count a human life, you can’t even count the hairs on your head, so how can you count a human life? That’s mothers’ hearts and everything being broken and everything from crime that these young children are doing.”
The number for Crime Stoppers is 901-528-CASH. The number for the Tennessee Arson Hotline is 1-800-726-3017.