Ohio man says he’s sympathetic to fears of taunter

March 26, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Overhaul fallout

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

An Ohio man with Parkinson’s disease says he is sympathetic to the fears held by a man who shouted at him and threw dollar bills in his lap during a heated health-care rally.

Bob Letcher, 60, who supported the health-care bill since signed by President Barack Obama, said Thursday that he appeals to all sides to “stop the violence and intimidation.”

Letcher sat with a sign at the March 16 rally that drew people on both sides of the health-care issue outside the office of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy.

In an episode The Columbus Dispatch captured on video and posted online, Chris Reichert, 40, is seen tossing two dollar bills into Letcher’s lap. Reichert and other opponents accused Letcher of looking for a handout to pay his medical expenses.

Reichert told the newspaper in an interview published Thursday that he is sorry and that he “absolutely snapped” during the rally last week. The father of two said he worries for his family.

“I’ve been looking at the Web sites,” he said. “People are hunting for me.”

Letcher told The Associated Press that he is “totally sympathetic” and offered to join Reichert in a public-service announcement making a plea for the Reichert family’s safety.

“I feel the urgency of freeing him from the same sort of fear of physical violence that he and other ... people attempted to induce in me,” Letcher said.

He said, however, that he remains skeptical of Reichert’s change of heart and that the contention that he snapped is “totally lacking in merit and credibility.”

Reichert said he has made a donation to a local Parkinson’s disease group to start a “healing process.”

Letcher, a former engineer and university lecturer, asked: “Shouldn’t the aggrieved have a say in what might start a ‘healing process?’”

Reichert’s behavior was called inappropriate by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which opposed the health-care legislation and helped organize the rally.