It’s a particularly brutal story, and not just because of the details of what happened to the victim, though that is of course the most awful part. Megan Williams, a 20-year-old mentally challenged black woman from Charleston, was held captive in a shed for a week in Big Creek, WV (about an hour southwest of Charleston) and was raped, beaten, stabbed, choked, forced to eat animal feces, and tortured in various other ways, until police received an anonymous tip and found her. Six people, all white, were arrested and charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, malicious wounding, battery, and lying to the police, among other charges. The group of six includes a mother and her son and another mother and her daughter, plus two other men.
The case is being investigated as a possible hate crime under state law. (Here’s a link to West Virginia’s hate crime statute.) The perpetrators reportedly called Williams a n*gger while stabbing her and told her: “This is what we do to n*iggers around here.” Also, the F.B.I. is investigating the incident for possible civil rights violations.
Based on subsequent reports, it seems that they should be charged with attempted murder as well. The magistrate who arraigned all six of them said that one of them, Frankie Brewster, told him that they had planned to take the woman to East Lynn Lake (about 30 miles west of Big Creek) and kill her. The magistrate said she just blurted it out at her arraignment. The things they were doing to Williams in that shed were certainly things that could have ended up killing her.
The fact that there were so many people involved in the crime is pretty stunning. In addition to the six people in custody, initial reports said that two people whom Williams knew had driven her to the location where she was held captive and tortured and that police were still looking for the two people. Other reports say it was one woman who drove her there. So it’s possible that up to eight people were involved.
According to the Logan County Prosecutor, Williams knew at least one of her captors and had been to their home on at least one prior occasion. This depraved group of people was well known to people in the area and to the police. The Associated Press reports that since 1991, these six people have accumulated 108 criminal charges among them, including first degree murder and lots of domestic violence charges. Two of them were indicted earlier this year for assaulting and robbing an 84-year-old woman in her home. (Those charges were dropped because the victim could not be located.)
It’s all very sickening, and like I said, I’m not sure what to even say or why to even blog about it; I just want to make people aware of it if they aren’t already. People need to be reminded that asinine statements that racism is dead are delusional (and racist themselves). If you need another example, read about Jena High School.
People also need to be reminded of why hate crime laws are a good thing. People who oppose hate crime laws will often say: Aren’t all violent crimes hate crimes? David Neiwert has written a lot about this topic, and this post contains a great analysis and explanation of what makes hate crimes different:
[H]ate crimes have the fully intended effect of driving away and deterring the presence of any kind of hated minority — racial, religious, or sexual. They are essentially acts of terrorism directed at entire communities of people, and they are message crimes: “Keep out.”
Rural dwellers’ dread of the dark colors of the inner city is something of a cliche, one based nonetheless on reality. What is less observed, however, is the common dread held by many minorities for America’s more rural spaces. Black people fear stepping foot in Idaho because of the presence of the Aryan Nations in the state’s Panhandle. Gays and lesbians view driving through places like Wyoming and Montana with a palpable anxiety.
If you get out a map of the country and put yourself in the shoes of a person of color or another sexual persuasion, and start looking at the places you would feel safe visiting, you’ll suddenly realize that this can be a very small country indeed for people who are not white heterosexuals. This is what Yale hate-crimes expert Donald Green means when he says that hate crimes annually create a “massive dead-weight loss of freedom” for Americans.
Hate crime laws are a way for society to send a message of deterrence:
The vast majority of hate-crime perpetrators, as I explain in Death on the Fourth of July, believe fully that they are committing these crimes with the unspoken approval of their respective community — that they are merely acting on its real desires. This (combined with a high incidence of narcissistic/antisocial personality disorders) lends itself to another common trait of hate criminals: they rarely believe they’ve done anything wrong. And it’s important to note that these perps consistently held these views well before they ever acted upon them.
Thus, high-profile and widely sanctioned expressions of community disapproval of these crimes play an essential role in discouraging further such acts. They inform any would-be hate criminals that, contrary to their preconceived notions, the community at large clearly does not approve of these kinds of acts, and rather than being community heroes, they will be pariahs.
Some food for thought.
Source:
http://ragingred.wordpress.com/2007/...west-virginia/