According to police reports the person that assaulted the student was Obie. That would be Dontae Obie, aspiring football player and MSU student, also present at the Kelvin Jones party where Trevor was attacked. Dontae, his mom, and his lawyer submitted to an interrogation. He said he was at the party where Trevor was beat but not at the party where the biker was punched. But he might know who did it. When asked about the assault that took place on the bicyclist, Dontae Obie claimed to have been at a “club” on that night. He heard an individual named “Boobie” whose first name was Byron was responsible for striking [Trevor Godfrey.]
With that information they were able to determine “Boobie” or “Byron” was Byron Hightower Jr. Hightower was a member of the MSU football team. He told police he just happened to be in Springfield in January and again a few weeks later. But as far as assaulting anyone, he did not do anything or know about anyone who did.
The police had come to another dead end. Many would have walked away.
Not Sherry Godfrey. She may not have known who tried to kill her son, “but we know for sure someone from that party knows something. Someone from the football team or the fraternity knows who assaulted Trevor.”
Sherry decided to go public. She requested a copy of the police reports and started her own investigation. She found many of the people questioned were football players and frat members. She read their Tweets and their Facebook pages. Kelvin Jones proclaimed on his Facebook page that he was “Not a Fighter, But will Knock you the F*CK out.”
Sherry created a Web page, where she posted all the information she had collected about the night of the attack, including graphic photos of Trevor’s wounds. Soon she was deluged with support from all over the country and getting more than a thousand visits a day. The university even called her, but the players who were suspects remained on the team.
Finally, almost one year after the assault, the local newspapers and TV stations ran a story about Sherry Godfrey’s Web site.
And the crime is in the cold case files.
4
THEY CHOSE THE WRONG GUY
Not everyone is a victim.
Deandre Felton was a good boy, his family and friends agree. He was also a leader. But on this night in September of 2012, Deandre and his crew were bored. The mall was closed, but he and his boys were high on drugs and still wanted to have fun. So Deandre came up with what was not a new idea, but fun nevertheless. They decided to beat someone up. They had just come from a local park where Deandre and fifteen others beat up two girls, sending one to the hospital with a broken arm. Then Deandre decided to blow off a little steam and play the Knockout Game. He knew the game was usually pretty safe—for the attacker, that is.1
In Meriden, Connecticut, victims aren’t likely to carry concealed weapons, nor do they fight back. As one player said in Philadelphia as his victim begged for mercy: “It’s not our fault you can’t fight.”
Deandre and his crew found their victim a few minutes after leaving the mall. Soon Deandre and his confederate DeShawn Jones were peeling off from the group, heading for a guy walking home from work. Alone. We don’t know his name or race or anything about him other than he was The Wrong Guy.
With their friends lurking less than one hundred yards away when Deandre and DeShawn attacked, the guy fought back. He pulled a knife. Soon Deandre was dead and DeShawn was on his way to the emergency room.
It took the police a few days to piece it together. While they were on the case, Facebook pages, Twitter streams, and a televised candlelight vigil were full of praise and happy memories for the fallen Deandre. Full of promises to catch the person responsible. Full of rumors about what happened, including some who thought Deandre could be the next Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was killed by a neighborhood watch commander.2
Police delayed releasing the results of their investigation for two weeks out of respect for Deandre’s family and on the advice of community leaders. Curiously, the police report did not mention the earlier mob attack involving Deandre. Nor did the police mention what, if anything, they did out of respect for the two female victims of the earlier assault.3
But the report left little doubt about what happened that night.
They talked to other members of Andre’s mob, plus a dozen more people, and they all said the same thing: Deandre and DeShawn attacked the Wrong Guy who then stabbed them in self-defense. The families did not want to hear that.
DeShawn’s mother said the police had it wrong. She claimed that her son was attacked. “This is a monster, this is a monster after children,” Alexis Jones said. “This man is still on the streets and my son is sitting home trying to recover. My son has two stab wounds in his back, one on his side, and he has a slice on his neck.”4
Deandre’s mother joined in: “I just don’t believe it. My son was not raised to be a troublemaker,” said Valda Felton. “I don’t want them or anyone else to make my child out to be a villain.”
Family friend and minister Rev. Dante Moss, who officiated at Deandre’s funeral, held a press conference and called the police findings a “comic book.” Moss compared Deandre to Trayvon.5
Police say not one of the people present corroborated Reverend Moss’s claim. But Reverend Moss just kept on. He posted almost a dozen times on Deandre’s Facebook page. No one said a thing about the two women beat up earlier in the night.
People posted comments that supported Deandre and DeShawn on a local news site. Deandre’s aunt pitched in: “Deandre was trying to help his friend after he got stabbed,” said Talitha Frazier “Then Deandre got stabbed in his back. I have one question. In the state of Connecticut at what point are you allowed to take someone’s life? Someone please answer that for me. I am his aunt.”6
Katie Lynn posted this after the funeral: “Deandre lost his life sticking up for his friend. He’s a hero. People just need to stop pointing fingers and realize the grief that family is going through.”7
Lots of people joined with Reverend Moss to say they had no faith in the police investigation. And they believed the crime against Deandre and DeShawn was racially motivated.
“Where’s the video? Show it to us,” said an online commenter to a Meriden Patch article. “Hmmmm. I want to know why they had to go find this guy 22 hours later if he was attacked. I want to know. Doesn’t sound right to me at all. He’s so innocent? Really? Then why did he run and hide? Just someone answer that.”8
But catching the Wrong Guy was not a problem. Hospital video and witness accounts led the police to his door less than one day after the attack. He handed over the knife and expressed surprise one of his attackers died.
Others in Meriden point to several other examples of black mob violence and say this was not an isolated incident. Said MeridenMom:
Where was justice when my 40 year old brother was innocently “jumped” last summer by a group of teens/young boys and when the neighborhood churchman was “jumped” this past summer walking home from a nightly service by a group of boys. My kids knew and went to school wit both teens and knew exactly what happened before news reported it. Kids was high looking for trouble and jumped somebody.9
Despite the best efforts of Reverend Moss to the contrary, the earth did not rock. No charges have been filed in the stabbing. Deandre was fifteen years old. DeShawn was thirteen.
Some of the violence in this book is black on white crime. But not all. In the next chapter we will look at the “dirty little secret” of racial violence targeted at Asians.
5
ASIAN TARGETS
Black students assault Asian students in a Philadelphia high
school almost daily for years. The school tells the Asians to
quite provoking blacks. Then we go to San Francisco for the
“dirty little secret.”
Lots of racial violence is targeted at immigrants, especially Asian. Surprised?
PHILADELPHIA
Where to start? Asian students? Or Asian business owners targeted for home
invasion robberies? Let’s start with the schools. And then we will end this chapter with some recent home invasion robberies.
One year before racial violence became so fashionable on the streets of South Philadelphia, racial brutality was ignored, denied, and even condoned just a few blocks away in the halls of South Philadelphia High School. The school was 70 percent black and 18 percent Asian. And it took years for anyone to admit that black students were systematically beating and harassing Asian students on a daily basis. School officials told local network news affiliates the attacks were in no way racial. In private, they said the Asians were the ones at fault. The stations dutifully reported the denials—without ever reporting on the claims of extreme and prolonged racial violence directed towards Asian students--by black students.
In 2010 the Department of Justice found that a contingent of largely black school officials dismissed, ignored, and even encouraged attacks on Asian students by black students. But that DOJ report was long after the attacks began.
In September 2009, G.W. Miller III of Philadelphia Weekly magazine detailed the attacks and the school’s tepid response. Despite the administration often calling harassment, intimidation, threats, and assaults “minor incidents,” the magazine nevertheless reported that:
At least six times last school year those minor incidents escalated into massive rumbles where outnumbered Asian students were pummeled by packs of teens, sending several of the victims to hospitals. Like the day last October when a group of around 30 kids allegedly attacked five Chinese students after school in the Snyder Avenue subway station, one block from school.
That incident started when a black student walked up to a Chinese kid in the cafeteria, touched his hair and allegedly threw a carton of milk at him. Rumors of threats filtered through the school on the day after the subway rumble, and the notion of continued violence froze Asian students.1
These kinds of assaults took place over a period of years and culminated on December 3, 2009, when black students from South Philadelphia high school attacked thirty Asian students, sending thirteen to the emergency room.
The Asian kids had wanted to be in school so badly they were willing to tolerate violence—until it became intolerable. Finally, Asian students went on strike.
School officials ignored the attacks at first, even refusing to meet with the striking students. Then school superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who, like most of the people working for her at the high school, is black, hinted the attacks were motivated by earlier attacks by Asian students on blacks, and that it was not fair to blame just one race. She claimed that she did not want to “criminalize” students at such an early age. And, the attacks were taking up too much of her time.
The Asian students reported that school officials often looked the other way, and even participated in the verbal harassment that preceded the violence. LaGreta Brown, the school’s fourth principal in five years, was cited for a discriminatory attitude, particularly for referring to the advocacy group’s efforts as “the Asian agenda.” On the morning of the attacks, the complaint says, she escorted about ten frightened Vietnamese students past a large group of black youths on a sidewalk. She told them she would walk with them if they were afraid, the advocacy group claimed. But as soon as she walked away and returned to school, the complaint says, the Vietnamese students were assaulted again.
When the students complained, they were beat for that, too. So they went on strike. Check out this report from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Somekawa described students at the school being mocked by staff: “Where are you from? Hey, Chinese. Yo, Dragon Ball. Are you Bruce Lee? Speak English,” quoting what students had told her.
Troung, the South Philadelphia student, recited a litany of problems with school staff.
She singled out the security officers, who she claimed forced Asian students to follow them into a lunchroom where they were attacked and who directed the frightened students to leave school after they were beaten.
Yan Zheng, another student, said that when students were fighting in the lunch room last Thursday, “the lunch lady did not do anything to stop them, and went around cheering happily. … The staff shouldn’t just stand there and watch and say, ‘Stopping fights is not my job.’”
Duong Thang Ly said the school’s security officers “are the big problem,” saying they looked the other way when a group of African American students interrupted a lunch line and heckled a group of Asian students. They ignored groups of students as they roamed during class time, Ly said.2
School officials conducted their own investigation. The district hired a retired black federal judge who said he focused his review on the two days prior to the mass beating and walkout, because if he went any further back that would cause problems in the present.
And not one reporter said “What do you mean by that?”
Attorneys for the Asian children dismissed the report as inaccurate and strangely narrow, ignoring the long history of racial violence against Asians at the school.3
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Attorneys Dismiss the Report
Finally, when the Department of Justice came in and found the school had a long history of black-on-Asian racial violence that school officials ignored, school officials admitted they might have had a problem. So they printed up some pamphlets and gave them to the Asian students, instructing them how to avoid antagonizing their black schoolmates with their racist behavior.
The leaders distributed a list of racial slurs and told the students: It’s wrong. And you need to know that slurs can escalate quickly and violently. … Immigrants can be too limited in English to recognize racist language—and the danger it may portend.4
Well, that is quite a back story. Asian students—the same ones who were fighting for their right to get an education—apparently were going around insulting the black students so the black students had no choice but to assault and harass them every day for years. So give the Asians instructions on how to avoid antagonizing black students. Maybe we can get a copy for Emily Guendelsberger and her crew.
Can someone explain to me how this school district got away with this for so long?
Ackerman left shortly after the debacle was exposed by the Justice Department.
This is one school over several years, but these kinds of assaults took place over the years at several Philadelphia schools. Sometimes the explanations themselves are useful because they reveal the mindset of people in charge. Consider sociologist Elijah Anderson’s take on it in this Philadelphia Weekly article:
“The school may be thought of as black turf by some black students,” says Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson, a renowned expert on black urban living. “The outsiders—the Asians who are making inroads—can then be called into account for any moves they make within that situation. You have race prejudice developing as a sense of group position, a proprietary claim on certain areas of the home turf.”
Anderson, who taught at Penn for 32 years and frequently uses Philadelphians in his research, believes that the school tensions are likely about dominance.
“It’s a human thing,” Anderson continues. “It could be Asians who get jumped. It could be blacks. It could be white, Italian, Jewish, whatever, if you know what I mean. This is not unique to blacks and Asians.”5
Does anyone have the slightest idea what this guy is talking about? I do not “know what you mean,” Mr. Anderson. Perhaps you could document the marauding bands of Asian and Jewish students beating black students and how that went unnoticed and uncorrected and even encouraged for years.
We’ll wait. Shall we notify the Department of Justice?
HOME INVASION ROBBERIES IN PHILLY
The dirty little secret busted wide open in Philadelphia in 2012. Over the three years prior, the Philadelphia Inquirer found:
at least 15 home invasions or other attacks on Asian business owners outside their businesses in Philadelphia, Delaware, and Montgomery counties in 2008, followed by another
spike of at least 19 actual or attempted home invasions or burglaries in those three counties plus Chester County in 2010.
[In 2012] at least six robberies or attempted burglaries of Asian business owners were reported at a home or bank in Montgomery, Delaware, and Philadelphia counties. And this year, in addition to the family in Haverford Township, a couple was robbed during a home invasion in Oxford Circle.6
By the time this news was less than a month old, at least two other Asian families became victims. These attacks have occurred in varying degrees of intensity and frequency for three years. I learned something important from YouTube and from talking to the district attorney’s office, yet which all the news stories fail to mention. In all the cases, all the suspects or perpetrators were black.
On June 8, 2012, the Inquirer reported a case where an Asian-American business owner and his family were attacked in a home invasion. “The victims were targeted as part of the recent trend in which thugs have attacked Asian business owners,” said the Inquirer. A group of armed black men:
terrorized and robbed an Asian-American business owner and his family. … The masked thugs forced him to lie face-down in the kitchen, Cheng said. They isolated his wife and daughter in other rooms.
They pointed guns at him, asked where money was, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t obey, Cheng said. He told them where to find money.
The thugs tied the family’s hands behind their backs and stuffed their mouths with socks, Cheng said. After about an hour, they forced Cheng, his wife, and daughter into the basement before they fled with cash and jewelry, he said.7
In April twelve Asians in Southwest Philadelphia were enjoying a night of karaoke when four black men with guns broke in and robbed the group. Also in April, four black men broke into the home of an elderly Asian couple and their handicapped son. The family was bound, threatened, and robbed. The mob’s entrance and exit was captured on a security video.
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 5