He Was House-Hunting With His Wife. He Saw KKK Memorabilia

A US Army veteran house-hunting with his wife made some distressing finds in one of the Michigan homes they toured, and now a Muskegon cop has been suspended as a result. The Washington Post reports that Rob Mathis, who's black, showed up with his wife, Reyna, at the five-bedroom house in Holton and immediately spotted Confederate flags or depictions of them scattered around the house and garage. "I'm thinking to myself as a joke, 'I'm walking to the imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan's house right now,'" he says in a Facebook post. It was a thought he was soon horrified to find out may not have been too far off: In the bedroom, he spotted a framed application to the KKK (see a pic here). Something else caught the attention of Mathis and his wife, per MLive: a police jacket and picture of a man in a police uniform.

Mathis says he immediately told the real estate agent he wasn't interested in the house, and he and his wife left. He adds he felt "sick" and "gross," "like I needed to be dipped in hand sanitizer" after seeing what he saw: "I thought, I need to say something because this is a public servant. He can't be impartial and fair to minorities if that's how he thinks." Muskegon City Manager Frank Peterson confirms the house belongs to 20-year police veteran Charles Anderson, who MLive notes was cleared of fatally gunning down a 23-year-old black man in 2009 after a scuffle during a traffic stop. On Thursday, the city announced "the officer was immediately placed on administrative leave" as an investigation takes place. As for Anderson, he's been tight-lipped. "They said not to talk about it," Anderson said when asked for comment by an MLive reporter. (More Ku Klux Klan stories.)