Now it’s not a hate crime?
CVK
(Thanks to Nishan for this tip) Two teenage white boys have been charged with an absolutely horrific attack against a Latino boy. From The Washington Post:
Authorities said the two dragged the boy from a house party Saturday and into the yard, where they sodomized him with a plastic pipe from a patio table umbrella and poured bleach on him. Trent on Friday described the pipe as being sharpened at one end and said Tuck stomped on the boy with steel-toe boots and kicked the pipe into him.
At one point, the teens tried to carve something on the boy’s chest with a knife, he told CNN Friday…
Bleach was poured over the boy’s body in an attempt to destroy DNA evidence, Sheriff’s Lt. John Denholm said.
Trent said Friday that doctors had also told investigators they suspected some kind of toxicity in his internal organs that may have been caused by foreign substance, “which makes me wonder if they didn’t pour bleach down the pipe as well.”
What’s odd about this story is that when it first broke, (check out this CNN report for example) the motivation behind the crime appeared to be that the Latino boy tried to kiss a white girl at the house party. But now, this Washington Post story is saying that the girl was Latina, not white, and that prosecutors won’t be seeking hate crime charges against the white teens. The prosecutor explains:
“I don’t know that the very beginning of the attack was racial,” Trent said, “but there’s no question that they were venting quite a bit of hatred in their hearts.”
Hmmm… how is it not a hate crime when the teens were yelling racial slurs as they were sodomizing and beating the boy? Also (and this is pure speculation on my part) I wonder if the boys thought the girl was white when in reality she was Latina? In which case, the reason for them attacking the Latino boy was clearly racially motivated–even if it involved a case of mistaken racial identity.
What’s particularly revolting about this case is that nobody called 911 until ten hours after the attack happened, even though there were multiple witnesses to the crime.
TheThink on 28 Apr 2006 at 12:57 pm
[…] Yesterday I loosely paralleled the recent hate crime that occurred in Spring, Texas to the 1955 Emmitt Till tragedy. The entire foundation of my argument rested on the fact that the little girl who the Hispanic* boy kissed was White, which is what the original CNN.com article described her as. Well, according to my buddies over at MMW (via a Washington Post article), the girl was actually Hispanic? According to WaPo, it seems as if: The attackers apparently were offended at the age difference between the victim and the girl, who is also Hispanic, and shouted racial slurs at him during the 10- to 15-minute attack, investigators said.” […]