Rucker said most of the damage from the fire was to the television and “other ordinary combustibles adjacent to the television.”

The fire produced a large amount of smoke, and there was soot on surfaces throughout the house, she said.

Rucker said there have been four fire-related fatalities in the city so far this year.

Cecil was an avid gardener who “adored her pets, especially her dog Maggie,” the obituary read.

Before retiring, she worked for the Internal Revenue Service and Lutheran Social Service, the obituary continued.

The message came from a 612 area phone number that no longer works. Burks, director of operations at Rochester Area Economic Development Inc., initially assumed she was targeted because she had just run for public office as a Black woman. She lost her bid Tuesday to become an Olmsted County commissioner. But after she shared the text on social media, others piped in with similar stories. She learned that the racist hoax appeared to be vast and coordinated, directed also at Black people in New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

“My other daughter, who is 11, she saw this all across TikTok. She asked me, ‘What’s a plantation?’” Burks said. “She knows about slavery. I had to explain to her what a plantation was. I had to explain that no one was going to take me, and that we’re OK. I told her it sounds like a joke, but it’s not funny at all.”

It was already a brutal week. She was saddened to see that voters chose to give a second term to a man who called Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to run for president on a major-party ticket, “lazy,” “a stupid person,” “slow,” “having low IQ,” and suggesting she was on drugs. These are all tropes used to denigrate Black people, and Burks told me she identifies with others underestimating her abilities because of her race and gender. (”I don’t parade my titles,” she says, even though she earned her MBA and is in the final stages of completing her doctorate degree.)

After receiving the text, one of the first people Burks called was her friend, Walé Elegbede, president of the Rochester branch of the NAACP. Like Burks, he fears that Trump’s win is encouraging other Americans to show their racism more freely.

“I suspect some groups will be emboldened to think this is carte-blanche to spew hate,” Elegbede said. “Now is going to be the time to protect vulnerable communities, to protect Black communities, because they are going to be the ones hit by this.”

Were these texts part of a nefarious campaign by a foreign entity to make us in America more fearful of each other than we already are? That could very well be. But Elegbede says we must not ignore the hate in our own backyards. Just this year, a racial slur was spotted on a pedestrian bridge in Rochester. Authorities later identified four teens as suspects in their investigation.

The classified documents case has been stalled since July when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed it on grounds that Smith was illegally appointed. Smith has appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the request to revive the case is pending. Even as Smith looks to withdraw the documents case against Trump, he would seem likely to continue to challenge Cannon’s ruling on the legality of his appointment given the precedent such a ruling would create.