Miss. teens charged in race-hate murder

11th July 2011   ·   0 Comments

Two young white men in Jackson, Miss., are accused of assaulting and then killing a Black man by hitting him with a pickup truck, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Prosecutors say that Deryl Dedmon and John Aaron Rice, both 18, were looking for a Black man to assault in Jackson, with one of them later bragging on the phone to a friend about killing 49-year-old father James Craig Anderson.

The story was first reported by the Daily Mail Reporter.

James C. Anderson was hit by a Ford pickup outside a Jackson hotel near dawn on June 26 and died later in a hospital, District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith said during a bond hearing last week for Deryl Dedmon, who is accused of driving the truck.

“Dedmon murdered this victim because he was a Black man,” the district attorney said. “We do have information that they were rejoicing after killing the victim.”

D.A. Smith said Dedmon called a friend after the alleged crime and said: “I just ran that n****r over.”

“It was an intentional act and it was a hate crime,” Smith added.

The hate-crime allegations resonated in Mississippi, which has a history for racial violence against Blacks, particularly during the civil rights struggle.

During a recent interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Henry Thomas, one of the four surviving original Freedom Riders, lauded the state of Mississippi for the strides it has made in race relations its high-profile racially motivated murders of victims like Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwernerin — in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mississippi received more negative publicity late last year when 26-year-old Frederick Jermaine Carter was found hanging from a tree on December 3, 2010 in predominantly white North Green­wood, Miss. Greenwood is about 12 miles from Money, Miss., the site of the grisly murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

On Wednesday, Judge Ali Shamsiddeen increased Deryl Dedmon’s bail from $50,000 to $800,000 after learning more details about the hate-crime allegations.

Dedmon and Rice are accused of assault murder.

Dedmon’s attorney, Lee Agnew, said during Wednesday’s bond hearing that the prosecution has presented no evidence to support the “racial allegations” and that the prosecution’s case was based on “a lot of hearsay” and “biased conclusions.”

According to The Daily Mail Reporter, Dedmon shook his head from side-to-side when D.A. Smith questioned a police detective and suggested that Anderson had been run over several times.

This article was originally published in the July 11, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper