Grieving Family Asks Republicans To Take Down Ad Blaming Sherrod Brown For Fatal Car Wreck

A grieving family has asked Republicans to take down a TV ad blaming a Democratic Senate candidate for a fatal car accident.

An ad supporting the reelection campaign of Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) claims his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, “opened our borders to dangerous illegals,” leading directly to an April crash that killed Ohio parents Luke and Lynnea Soposki and their 1-year-old child.

Lynnea Soposki’s brother, Jesse Mallen, said the family was not asked if the names and faces of the deceased could be shown in the ad, and they’d privately asked Husted’s campaign to take the ad down but got no response.

“The lack of empathy for a grieving family is pretty shocking,” Mallen told HuffPost in an interview on Wednesday. He stressed he didn’t want to be political about it at all.

Mallen went public with his complaint in a Facebook post on Tuesday, which he asked friends to share in an effort to pressure the ad’s makers to take it down. He said he’d previously made the request by email and certified letter to the Husted campaign.

“This is not a statement about immigration policy, and we are not making one for any party or candidate. It is a statement about our family. Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols,” Mallen wrote. “Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone’s advantage.”

It’s common for candidates to use constituents’ tragedy or suffering for political advantage — especially, in recent years, for Republicans highlighting crimes committed by immigrants. But it’s better to do it when grieving constituents are actually on board with being part of a political message.

In the case of this particular ad against Brown, the message doesn’t even make much sense. As FactCheck.org reported Tuesday, the immigrant who’s been charged with crimes related to the crash came to the U.S. in the 1990s, long before Brown had any impact on U.S. immigration policy. The National Republican Senatorial Committee pointed to a vote Brown took as a House member against an immigration enforcement bill in 1996, even though he voted in favor of its final passage as part of a bigger “omnibus” bill.

Brown’s campaign declined to comment. Husted’s campaign, which authorized the ad, did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for the NRSC, which paid for the ad, said “radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing.” The spokesman didn’t mention the Soposki family.

Mallen said he wanted the ad pulled from TV and also from YouTube, where it’s had more than 5 million views.

“Lynnea was my sister, and I don’t want to see her face being tossed in disgusting ads like that,” Mallen said.