Army Lt. Richard Collins III killed by intoxicated neo-Nazi on U of MD campus.
This is currently the lead story on the Baltimore Sun’s website :
A black Bowie State University student who was set to graduate this week may have been killed over the weekend in a random, racially-motivated attack by a white University of Maryland, College Park student, officials said Sunday.
UM's police chief said Sunday that the suspect, [*name deleted because he doesn’t deserve the attention*], of Severna Park, was a member of an offensive, racist Facebook group. An FBI official, who said the federal agency will assist with UM's investigation, said officials are investigating it as a possible hate crime, but that they have not made a formal determination of a motive.
Details of the attack:
- The victim, Richard Collins III, was a student at Bowie State University, roughly 8-10 miles away. He was about to graduate. He was a member of ROTC and had just been commissioned as an Army lieutenant two days before he was murdered.
- The suspect, an intoxicated white man, approached Lt. Collins at 3 AM at a bus stop outside a dormitory on the University of Maryland campus. This followed:
According to charging documents, Collins' friends heard [*murderer*] scream as he approached them from next to the trees near the bus stop.
[*murderer*] said "Step left, step left if you know what's best for you," the documents say. Collins said "no" and [*murderer*] continued to approach before stabbing him once in the chest, they say.
- The suspect was a member of a racist Facebook group called the “Alt-Reich”. (Hence the “neo-Nazi” in the title, which I think is supported by this piece of evidence alone). Because of this affiliation, the incident is being investigated as a hate crime.
- The murder was captured on surveillance cameras. There seems to be no doubt whatsoever about the identity of the murderer.
Not all of the facts of this case are known yet and I don’t want to jump too hard to conclusions. The most important thing is to honor the victim and the life he lived.
But it’s beyond dispute that neo-Nazis now feel more emboldened than they have in decades. This has terrible consequences. And the politicians who benefit from the support of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and their ilk ought to think long and hard about whether they’re OK with that.
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Well, if he is guilty, he should swing for the murder. As I've heard people on here say, any homicide is a hate crime. Being a member of a FB group means literally nothing, but it does make good headline fodder to taint a person.
And an epidemic? You're almost funny.
That's the number of hate incidents ThinkProgress has tracked since Nov. 9, 2016, when Donald Trump was declared president-elect. Of the 261 incidents, 109 — or 42% – "included specific references to Trump, his election, or his policies."
Now, the number does seem notably smaller than Southern Poverty Law Center 's 867 reported post-election hate crime incidents. ThinkProgress ' tracker only included acts of hate violence toward individuals and communities rather than public and private places — like vandalized mosques or spray-painted churches. The incidents listed in ThinkProgress ' database also only included incidents that were backed up with news coverage, police reports or through the publication's own investigation into the incident.
Since Donald Trump won the Presidential election, there has been a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that there were four hundred and thirty-seven incidents of intimidation between the election, on November 8th, and November 14th, targeting blacks and other people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the L.G.B.T. community, and women. One woman in Colorado told the S.P.L.C. that her twelve-year-old daughter was approached by a boy who said, “Now that Trump is President, I’m going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find.” At a school in Washington State, students chanted “build a wall” in a cafeteria. In Texas, someone saw graffiti at work: “no more illegals 1-20-17,” a reference to Inauguration Day.
For starters.
His membership in a racist FB group could imply motivation for a hate crime. At 3 a.m. you can bet he was drunk or otherwise high also.
The suspect's lawyer says he was extremely drunk and incoherent at the time he stabbed the victim.
I doubt if they can get hate crime from that, although plain ol murder is obvious.
If he is a self-declared racist, then I didn't think that intoxication was a valid defense in most states? I'm not sure about that, but it seems that they could still get a hate crime attached to it?