Shelly Owens told KETV that firefighters were called to her Council Bluffs home at around 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
“I’m very angry,” she said. “I’m just fortunate that my kids were in school and that we weren’t home.”
Owens, who is white, and her African-American fiance were both at work when they found out their house was on fire. The couple’s biracial children were also in school at the time.
The perpetrators vandalized her home and even spray-painted the walls.
“They wrote the ‘N-word’ all over my walls,” Owens explained. “This is against me, I guess, and it’s a hate crime.”
Council Bluffs police Sgt. David Dawson said that investigators were looking into the incident as a possible hate crime.
“We very rarely have anything that I can remember for quite a while that I would say is related to a hate crime over here,” Dawson told KETV.
