A suburban Chicago youth baseball coach who was suspended after posting on Facebook that he was "so sick of reading about this dumb stupid N***** Whitney Houston" has now resigned from his post after reportedly receiving death threats.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that John Kelly, of Oak Lawn, Ill., resigned from the board of Westside Baseball of Oak Lawn, a youth league, on Sunday, after he received death threats via the league website's guestbook, e-mails, text messages and other websites.
"I can't deal with it anymore. I'm here to volunteer to help kids, and this is the [expletive] I have to go through," Kelly told the Sun-Times.
Kelly, the league board's former president, had originally planned to continue to serve on the board, even as he was banned from coaching for the next year and asked to complete a sensitivity training course.
He came under fire after the mother of a former league player, who is black, saw the Facebook post, which has since been deleted, and alerted other community parents and children to it by reposting it on the group's Facebook page, Patch reports.
The post in question went on to read, "she's the dumb ass that decided to do drugs n kill herself stay with that woman beater ... she blew more $$ up her nose than most of ye will make in yer lifetime ... there are kids dying real fathers n mothers fighting for their lives...grow up ye dumb assess...think she'd give a flying f*** about u???? Just saying."
Kelly, who ran unsuccessfully in the 2008 Democratic primary for Cook County Recorder of Deeds, claims that the controversy has "ruined" his life, that he is not a racist and that he "didn't even realize I put [the epithet] in until after I sent it."