Above all, Donald Trump made it socially acceptable again to assault, harm, and even kill Black people because we are Black. And in 2020 hate crimes still happen.
Devin Freelon Jr. and two friends were playing music while walking to the parking lot in a waterfront park in Monroe County, Mich., when they saw a White man walking toward them.
“N------ don’t belong on this beach,” Lee James Mouat yelled at the boys, who are Black, on June 6, according to a criminal complaint released this week.
Mouat, 42, then grabbed a bike lock and struck Freelon, 18, in the face, said several witnesses. The blow knocked out several of Freelon’s teeth and shattered his jaw.
Federal prosecutors charged Mouat on Tuesday with a hate crime for “willfully causing bodily injury to an African-American teenager because of the teenager’s race.” If convicted, Mouat faces up to 10 years in prison.
The case is the latest hate-crime charge filed by federal prosecutors this year against White suspects accused of attacking Black people in racially charged assaults. Federal prosecutors charged a man in September for allegedly stabbing a Black man in Oregon, unprovoked, several times last December. A woman in Queens, who is accused of throwing a glass bottle at a Black woman who was jogging and yelling “go back to Africa” in August, also received hate-crime charges last month.
At least four people witnessed the alleged assault in Michigan, according to the criminal complaint written by Sean D. Nicol, a special agent with the FBI’s Detroit Division in Ann Arbor, Mich.
It was the evening of June 6, and Freelon and his two friends had been walking in William C. Sterling State Park, a public park with a lakeside beach about 35 miles south of Detroit, and listening to music on a portable speaker.
Two witnesses told the investigator that they heard a White man, later identified by police as Mouat, loudly complaining about the music, calling the boys the n-word and “monsters.”
“These n------ are playing gang music,” Mouat said, according to one of the witnesses. “I want to hit them with this cooler.” And, “I wish someone would say something to me so I can beat them.”
The second witness observed Mouat, who was walking with his family, approach the boys in the parking lot. The witness heard the man threaten to “bash their heads in if they don’t turn [their music] down,” he told the investigator.
The difference is there are federal hate crime laws, laws that need to be strengthened, and the strengthening of those laws continue to be blocked by racist white Republicans like Rand Paul who say racism is over, and that laws like this are more likely to be used against white people through false accusations.
Devin Freelon got his teeth smashed out for being Black.
But we don't need laws to protect us from assault and murder?
"But we already have laws against assault and murder, they still happen!" Well, we have laws against discrimination too, but that happens daily in America.
So maybe they need better punishment to keep them from happening?
Black Lives Still Matter.
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