FRONT ROYAL — Christel Guillen and three of her colleagues, all of whom are people of color, visited Front Royal in early April for a three-night stay at Tareq Salahi’s home through Airbnb for a work retreat, but awoke after the second night to find an effigy depicting a lynching in the back yard.
The group is working on starting an alternative school in Washington, D.C., that aims to help what Guillen calls “black and brown” youth and will focus heavily on understanding institutionalized racism. The four rarely have time to work all together on this project, so she said they planned a work retreat that wouldn’t be too far from D.C., and chose Salahi’s home.
Guillen, 32, said she woke up on the morning of April 8 looking to relax on the hammock behind the house in an open picnic area, and was taking an Instagram live video on her walk down the trail. She returned to the house after forgetting something, and on her way back down the path to the hammock is when she said she saw on the ground the boots, jeans, flannel shirt and black cloth sack (as a head) tied up with rope to simulate a lynching
“Right away I started realizing how fresh it looked,” Guillen said, noting that it did not have any debris from the trail or the storm that weekend. “I started feeling like this was left for us intentionally because of how fresh it was.”
Briahnna M. Brown 