Crime

The woman who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape nearly four years ago has been charged with attempted murder, arson and other counts after a fight with her boyfriend, police said.

Crystal Mangum, 31, was arrested late Wednesday on charges including assaulting her boyfriend, Durham police said in a press release.

Durham County jail records indicate she also was charged with identity theft, communicating threats, damage to property, resisting an officer and misdemeanor child abuse. A judge ordered that she remain in jail on a $1 million bond. Mangum had no attorney listed Thursday.

Source/Full Story: FOXNews.com

Samson Ojo, 24, is charged with rape and kidnapping after police say he attacked a woman inside a movie theater on Sunday.

A 21-year old woman said Ojo followed her to the bathroom and forced her into an empty theater where the sexual assault took place. “It’s not good, it’s horrible feeling like this,” said the alleged victim during an exclusive interview with FOX 8.
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Police said Ojo was at the Cinemark Theater on Lexington-Springmill Road with his wife and step-children. Chief Smith said Ojo made eye contact with his alleged victim before he followed her out of one theater and pulled her into an empty theater.
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Police say the suspect’s wife was very cooperative and confirmed that her husband left the theater more than once and she tried to call him on his cell phone. “The thing that makes me the most sick about it, is that he went and sat back down like nothing had happened,” said the 21-year old woman.

Source/Full Story: WJW

More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country’s worst riots in years.

The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe.

Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.

The images emerging from Calabria over the weekend — of torched cars and angry African immigrants hurling rocks — were the most vivid example of the growing racial tensions in Italy, which have been exacerbated by an economic crisis whose depth has only recently been acknowledged in the national dialogue. Both the official and underground economies increasingly rely on immigrants, while Italy remains torn between acceptance and xenophobia.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

Troy Knapp’s killing was 10 years in the making, a gradual death by inches and degrees.

His brutal beating at the hands of an angry mob sparked outrage and spurred marches a decade ago. But long after the headlines faded, Knapp soldiered on in a battered and broken body that no longer responded to his commands.

Bedridden, in chronic pain and saddled with seizures, Knapp hung on until Nov. 6, when his body finally gave out for good. At age 43, he became North Charleston’s 11th homicide of 2009, the victim of a slow-motion killing too old to carry the possibility of a murder charge.

Knapp died as a result of severe injuries he suffered in his October 1999 beating,

Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten said. But there is nothing more police can do. South Carolina law won’t allow a murder prosecution in a case where the victim lives more than three years after his injuries were inflicted.

Six men were convicted of lynching in the attack on Knapp. Just two remain in prison, though they are expected to be released within the year.

That doesn’t sit right with Knapp’s family.

“I think it sucks,” said Angela Knapp, his sister and caretaker. “Their lives are just getting started as his is ending. I think they should at least have to pay to bury him.“

Knapp, a former auto mechanic, was 34 when he and friend Gary Thornburg were attacked while riding their bicycles near Bexley Street and South Rhett Avenue. Thornburg escaped serious injury, but Knapp was beaten so badly he was in a coma for weeks.
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Police initially charged 16 suspects between the ages of 14 and 22. The case stoked racial tensions, as the suspects are black and the two victims white. But police have said robbery, not race, appeared to be the motive for the assault.
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Knapp’s family went into debt to pay for his funeral, his sister said. He never got a dime of the restitution money his attackers had been ordered to pay, and no life insurance company would touch him. If his aunt hadn’t offered a burial plot next to his grandparents, Knapp’s family might not have had a place to lay him to rest, Angela Knapp said.
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Source/Full Story:  The Post and Courier

Tyler County officers on Saturday nabbed a 31-year-old white supremacist charged in the Christmas Day shooting death of a convenience store owner in Liberty County, and authorities are investigating whether the killing is a hate crime.

Stevie “Bubba” Walder, 31, is charged with capital murder, accused of shooting 50-year-old Naushad Virani while robbing the Chubby’s Convenience Store on North Main in Liberty County, said Hugh Bishop, public information officer for Liberty police.

Virani, a husband and father, was shot in the head.

Walder, whose many tattoos include a swastika and a skull, was arrested without incident.

But, said Bishop, Walder has not been as cooperative since his arrest, verbally threatening jailers since being put behind bars on Saturday.

His criminal background in Texas includes convictions for a terroristic threat and burglary of a habitation, court records show.

Walder failed to appear in a Harris County court Dec. 4 on a charge of aggravated assault of a family member, forfeiting a $40,000 bond, according to court records.

On Christmas Day, a couple found Virani lying in blood on the floor of his store around 10:30 p.m.

Bishop said investigators are unsure if Virani was targeted for his ethnic background or if robbery was the only motive.

Source/Full Story: Houston Chronicle

CNN is reporting that the “FBI cites thousands of hate crimes in ‘08″, and indeed it does, but what does that really mean?

Hate crime has been much in the news lately, with an expansive new law put on the books just last month. Today, we’re releasing our latest annual statistics on the extent of bias-fueled crime across the country, which we hope will contribute to the ongoing national dialogue and to public and private efforts to address its underlying causes.

Overall, the 2008 numbers are up slightly—7,783 incidents and 9,691 victims (including individuals, businesses, and institutions) were reported to us by our law enforcement partners across the country. But a note here: our Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program doesn’t report trends in hate crime stats—yearly increases or decreases often occur because the number of agencies who report to us varies from year to year.

You can find much more information in the full report, broken down into categories such as locations, victims, offenders, incidents, and offenses.

Source/Full Story: FBI
Technorati Tags: hate crimes

Hal Turner, the organizer of a white supremacist rally in Kingston four years ago, has been freed on $500,000 bond in a case where he is accused of threatening lawmakers and judges in two states.
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Turner was arrested at his North Bergen, N.J., home in June after authorities said he posted online threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.

Turner’s attorneys said he merely gave his opinion, which was protected free speech.

His lawyer also claims Turner worked as an FBI informant and spied on right-wing organizations from 2002 to 2007.

Source/Full Story:  The Daily Freeman News
Technorati Tags: Hal Turner

I will assume that Christine Quinn’s “standard” applies equally to the ADL, the SPLC, and those of a similar ilk who are rather quick to jump on anyone proud of their white heritage….right?

A man brutally beaten in New York City was targeted because he is openly gay, the New York Police Department said Monday.
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“When someone is attacked for being who they are, and for being proud of who they are, there is no other explanation for that attack than hatred and bigotry,” said New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the first openly gay speaker of the city council.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

Brian Milligan Sr. believes his son’s race triggered a brutal attack on the streets of Buffalo, New York.

Armed with a chunk of concrete, several assailants beat Brian Milligan Jr. on the back of the head on August 18, leaving a 3-inch gash. They kicked him in the face, breaking his jaw.

Bloodied and bruised, the 18-year-old managed to walk five blocks to his grandmother’s house before being rushed to the hospital.

Milligan’s father believes several African-Americans beat his son, who is white, because he is dating an African-American woman. He wants police to treat the beating as a hate crime. He also has criticized what he calls a deafening silence from the community, police and the national media.

“If this was a black guy who was beaten by a group of white guys for dating a white girl, people would be up in arms,” he said. “There’s a double standard.”

Buffalo police believe a group of about 10 to 15 African-American men attacked Milligan late at night, police spokesman Mike DeGeorge said. Police have made no arrests and are still investigating the motive, he said.

Milligan Sr. says he believes the attackers are the same “neighborhood guys” who threatened his son and his African-American girlfriend because of their interracial relationship.

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The story has touched a nerve with several members of Buffalo’s African-American community, including a local pastor who leads a predominantly black church in Buffalo.

“At first, it didn’t affect me the way that it would have if I heard it was a black teen attacked,” said the Rev. Darius Pridgen, who spent years fighting for civil rights for African-Americans.

“But after I saw his father on TV pleading with the community to find the assailants, I decided I had to go after the people who beat this kid.”

Source/Full Story @: CNN.com
Technorati Tags: hate crime

A federal judge has reduced by nine months the prison sentence of a white-separatist group member who was convicted in a conspiracy to scare minorities into staying off the streets of Salt Lake City.

U.S. District Judge Dee Benson on Tuesday ordered Eric G. Egbert’s 42-month sentence reduced to 33 months.

The reduction was not opposed by prosecutors. It is meant to correct a disparity between Egbert’s sentence and those of his co-defendants, Shaun A. Walker and Travis D. Massey.

Egbert, Walker and Massey were convicted in April 2007 of conspiracy to interfere with civil rights and interference with a federally protected activity in connection with the 2002 and 2003 attacks of 2 minority men.

Source/Full Story: KIFI