A vocal critic of embattled mayor Tiffany Henyard believes her home was sprayed with bullets at the behest of the official during a bitter feud between them last summer.
Two cars belonging to tenants of former Village of Dolton Trustee Valeria Stubbs, a retired member of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, were riddled with at least nine shots last July.
The raid, she believes, stemmed from her public attacks on Henyard, who has been accused of plundering the debt-ridden Illinois town’s coffers to pay for lavish travel, dinners and personal indulgences.
Asked if she believes Henyard, 40, was behind the shooting, Stubbs didn’t hesitate.
“Absolutely,” she told The Post.
Stubbs said Henyard has personally menaced her at her home several times prior to the incident — the first during a snowstorm last winter.
At the time, Stubbs had accused the mayor of hiring a registered sex offender as a village code enforcement officer, and publicly demanded he be removed from his position.
Henyard and her team did not respond to calls for comment from The Post Monday.
Soon after, Henyard posted a bizarre video of herself personally shoveling snow from Stubbs’ driveway.
“This is what it looks like when you pull up on your haters,” a smiling Henyard states. “Guess what? I am there for all my haters. It doesn’t matter. Because I am the mayor of all of Dolton — the good, the bad and the ugly. And even the hateful.”
Clearly confused, Stubbs emerges from her home and appears briefly on camera. Henyard, she said, told others she had called the village to have the snow cleared.
“I never called her to come,” she explained. “She was just harassing me. I went to the next board meeting and told her to stop lying.”
Several months later, after an unsuccessful recall effort Stubbs helped to organize, Henyard again came to her property with an intimidating “caravan of police and city workers,” the retired deputy said.
“I wasn’t home, and they rang all the doorbells of me and my tenants, asking where I was,” she said. “They called me and told me there were all these people outside. I called Henyard, but she didn’t answer.”
Stubbs again went to a board meeting to confront the mayor during a public comment session.
“I wanted it on record that this woman was coming to my house and harassing me,” she said. “I told her not to come to my house again under any circumstances.
Two months later, Stubbs woke up around 6:30 a.m. to a barrage of gunshots. She went outside and comforted a shaken bystander who had been waiting for the bus nearby at the time.
Stubbs later went to the back of her home and saw two of her tenants’ cars strafed with bullet holes and shell casings on the ground.
A video recorded by a neighbor’s boorbell camera captured the shots, and showed two men running from the scene, jumping in a white car and screeching off.
Stubbs said she believes Henyard was behind the incident.
She reported the shooting to local police, but said the department is stocked with the mayor’s allies.
“They refused to give me the police report,” she said. “And I haven’t heard anything since. We don’t trust the police here.”
Residents in the neighborhood are so afraid they now tell each other where they are going for outings and notify neighbors when they get home, Stubbs said.
Henyard, a failed burger joint owner, has burst into the spotlight for her antics as mayor, including dressing as fictional drug kingpin Nino Brown from the 1991 crime classic “New Jack City” during a board meeting and having a DJ blast Rihanna’ “Bitch Better Have My Money” during the proceeding.
Critics assert that she is running a fiefdom of fear, pulling licenses from businesses who refuse to contribute to her coffers and using local law enforcement as a personal intimidation force.
Thanks in part to Henyard’s spending habits, the town of 20,000 is now millions of dollars in debt. Mismanagement is so bad, some said, Dolton police cruisers are on the verge being repossessed due to non-payments.
Stubbs said she now watches her back around town – and is hoping the pleas for help from the struggling village will at some point be heard.
“I just want to see justice done,” Stubbs said.