More Racially Motivated Attacks Reported in Baltimore

The Baltimore Sun reports that an increasing number of Baltimore residents and tourists have been victims of random, unprovoked attacks in the downtown area over the past month by roving groups of young people.

The victims report being attacked from behind while they walk, punched and kicked in the head and upper body by groups of males and females. Items are rarely taken, so police don't believe robbery is a motive.

In one of the attacks, a man was repeatedly kicked in the head while a knife was held to his girlfriend's face. Marisa Parish, 29, watched helplessly as her boyfriend, George Williams, 35, had his head kicked back and forth like a soccer ball. After one of the attackers told her boyfriend "You're dead," Parish broke free and tried desperately to protect her boyfriend's head. Parish was knocked unconscious, but she did save her Williams' life.

The attacked couple was white, and all of their attackers were black. The victims believe race was a factor in their assault. One of the black attackers accused the man of shouting a racial epithet; the couple denies this.

According to the article, the attack on Williams and Parish was only one of the 12 assaults that occurred that night in Baltimore. Although the article doesn't mention the races of the suspects and victims of the other 11 attacks, we can safely guess that most of the attacks were black-on-white. There have been a number of gruesome black-on-white attacks in Baltimore in recent years.

• In December 2007, Sarah Kreager, a 26-year-old white woman, suffered broken facial bones after she was punched, kicked and dragged off a bus in Baltimore by a group of black youths. The group also attacked Kreager's boyfriend and menaced an elderly white passenger. Kreager's beating was so vicious that two seats and the bus’s rear glass were destroyed during the attack. The Maryland Transit Authority initially said it was investigating the attack as a hate crime, but no hate crimes charges were ever filed.

As in the recent beating of Williams and Parish, Kreager's attackers tried to blame the victim by claiming she had used the word "nigger." This tactic is commonly used to try to deflect blame onto white victims. For example, Mychal Bell, the 4-time convicted jevenile felon who was one of the Jena 6, claimed the white student he knocked unconscious had used the word "nigger;" dozens of other witness statements, by white and black students, disputed this allegation.

• Less than a week after the attack on Kreager, two white men were beaten by a group of black youths on another Baltimore bus. One of the victims, Patrick Green, was adamant that he had been the victim of a hate crime. "It was a hate crime against me because I was white. I did not know these gentlemen. The whole time during the beating it was, 'white this, white that.' They didn't want anything from me except to see me beaten."

Following this second bus attack, Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon (who is under indictment) publicly refuted Green's allegations, declaring that the motives for the attacks were "not race based." In response, Green asked the Maryland Transit Authority officials to release surveillance video of the attack, saying it would prove the beating was a hate crime. The MTA refused Green's request.

Instead, the MTA introduced a program to monetarily reward black students who pledged to refrain from attacking white people while riding the bus. Discount cards good at local businesses were handed out at the African American Heritage Festival to students who pledged good behavior.

The victims of the bus attacks were lucky in that they lived to tell what happened to them. Other white victims haven't had the opportunity to tell their story.

• In April of 2006, Jennifer Morelock and Jason Woycio were fatally shot in Baltimore. A 17-year-old black youth was caught with a cell phone that had the sent text message “I killed 2 white people around my way 2day & 1 of them was a woman.”
  

What seemed like a slam-dunk, open-and-shut murder case went south when the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office cut the teen loose because the arresting officer had only a consent search to look at the cell phone’s contents, not a warrant. The murderer walked.

When whites accused of harming non-whites are acquitted, either by an "all-white jury" or on a legal technicality, politicians and black activists step forward to demand the white suspects face federal "civil rights" charges. When non-whites avoid prison after killing whites, as in the Morelock and Woycio murders, demands for civil rights charges aren't made and the cases are quietly dropped altogether.

• In November 2008, Aysha Ring, a 24-year-old white woman, was waiting in line at a liquor store when David Aaron Briggs, a 23-year-old black man, walked up behind her and slit her throat. Ring was taken to Shock Trauma, where she died. Briggs didn't say or take anything during the stabbing.

Hate crimes are defined as crimes in which the offender's criminal act is motivated, in whole or part, by his/her bias. FBI guidelines list a number of factors that, when combined, are support for a finding of a hate crime. Several of these factors were at play in one or more of the incidents described in this article:

1. The offender and the victim were of different race

All of the assaults described in this article involve black offenders and white victims.

2. Bias-related oral comments, written statements, or gestures were made by the offender which indicated his/her bias.

Racially-abusive language was during many of the attacks.

5. The victim is a member of a racial ... group ... who is overwhelmingly outnumbered by members of another group

Baltimore is 65% black and 30% white. The 2 bus beatings and the recent beatings in the Inner Harbor area all involve large groups of young black boys and girls attacking one or two white individuals.

6. The victim was visiting a neighborhood where previous hate crimes have been committed against other members of his/her race ... and where tensions remain high against his/her group.

40 Baltimore police officers are assigned each night to patrol the waterfront, but they seem powerless to stop the rash of recent attacks.

7. Several incidents have occurred in the same locality, at or about the same time, and the victim(s) were all of the same racial group.

In December 2007, two black-on-white beatings occurred within a week of each other on MTA buses. Recently, there has been a rash of black-on-white beatings in the Inner Harbor area.

Most of the crimes described in this article appear to meet the definition of a hate crime, yet none of them have been prosecuted as such. The black-on-white attacks will continue, and there will be more victims like Sarah Kreager, George Williams, and Marisa Parish, until white people in Baltimore stand up and take action to protect themselves.


Sarah Kreager suffered broken bones in her left eye socket after 9 black youths attacked her on a Baltimore bus in 2007. There have been a number of vicious black-on-white crimes in Baltimore in recent years, but none of them have been prosecuted as hate crimes.