POPLAR GROVE — Shayne Howe’s 17-year-old daughter ran screaming into the kitchen of their Hants County home shortly after midnight Saturday night as a man outside yelled: “Die nigger die.”

Howe grabbed a baseball bat and rushed outside to confront the man, who disappeared into the darkness.

On the lawn, a two-metre wooden cross was aflame and a hangman’s noose dangled from it.

“I just stood and watched it until the rope burned through and the noose fell to the ground,” Howe said Monday in an interview at his home on the Avondale Road near Newport Station.

Police are investigating a possible hate crime that has Howe and his family fearing for their safety.

Windsor District RCMP and general investigative services are investigating.

Sgt. Brigdit Leger, the provincial RCMP spokeswoman, said police don’t know how many people were involved but they suspect the man was not alone.

Howe, 31, originally from north-end Halifax, is black and his wife, Michelle Lyon, is white. The couple have five children from age two to 17.

They have lived in a bungalow on Avondale Road in Poplar Grove, a small community near the St. Croix River, for six years and have never had any trouble before.

“I’m scared,” Howe said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, whether to move. I don’t know what the next step is, or what’s going to happen.

“I don’t want to be here, (if) it means I’m not going to sleep at night.”

Howe said the children are terrified.

“They want to move. They don’t want to stay,” he said. “This is something kids shouldn’t have to experience.”

He said his wife grew up in the area and they have done a lot of work on the house. They’d like to stay.

“I’m a go-to-work, come-home kind of person. I don’t have troubles with anyone in the community,” said Howe, as he struggled to understand the nature of the threat, which came in the midst of Black Heritage Month in Nova Scotia.

Cross-burnings are usually associated with the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan in the American South of decades ago. But in October 1996, firefighters encountered a burning cross and racist graffiti at a pizza shop in Bible Hill.

“I have respect from everybody in the community,” Howe said of Poplar Grove. “I just don’t understand this.”

His wife is terrified.

“I’m mortified by this,” she said. “I have a lot of emotions.

“It’s scary, the kids are scared . . . scared is an understatement.

“I’ve secured my home.”

Lyon said she is looking to move because she fears the cross-burning might be just the beginning.

“For safety reasons, we have to take precautions,” she said. “This is heinous.

“We take shifts sleeping. Threats were made and we take them seriously.”

Lyon then burst into tears.

“It’s sad that somebody could do something like this to innocent people,” she said. “The kids are all very upset.”

Vince Upshaw, who works with the West Hants African Resource Centre, said Monday that news of the cross-burning shocked him.

“We’re trying to do things here to eliminate barriers,” he said.

Upshaw, from nearby Three Mile Plains, a community where African ancestry is common, said he has experienced racism throughout his life but the cross-burning is on another level.

“Imagine the impact this would have on a family, and the kids,” he said. “To me, it’s a message of hatred.”

Richard Dauphinee, warden of the Municipality of West Hants, said he has never heard of a cross-burning in the area.

“I think whoever did it is a sick individual, or individuals,” he said.

“I don’t want our community to be labelled by anything like this. I hope they’re caught and very quickly dealt with.”

Krista Daley, CEO of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, learned of the cross-burning from TheChronicleHerald.ca and called it “unacceptable.”

She said about 20 per cent of human rights complaints the commission sees each year are based on racism — what she called subtle forms, as opposed to overt racism — related to employment, services and accommodation. These typically involve policies that aren’t being properly implemented, she said.

“The fact that this type of overt, ignorant and intolerant behaviour would still be taking place is quite distressing,” Daley said.

“I think in terms of setting (us) back, though, the issue really is how do we handle this as a society? Do we equally feel outraged that this type of behaviour is still taking place, and to take some form of action from there.”

With Patricia Brooks Arenburg, staff reporter

( gdelaney@herald.ca)