US: ‘Three Blacks Killed In Hate Crime’
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
JACKSONVILLE, USA (Worthy News) – The U.S. Justice Department confirmed Sunday that it is investigating a mass shooting that killed three Black people in the city of Jacksonville as a hate crime.
“Yesterday in Jacksonville, Florida, three people were killed in a horrific act of hate,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement seen by Worthy News.
He spoke after a White gunman in his 20s opened fire in a Jacksonville Dollar General store near a historically Black university. Armed with an AR-15 type rifle and a handgun, he killed two male victims and one female victim at the store before fatally shooting himself, police said.
“In the wake of the mass shooting, [Federal Bureau of Investigation] FBI and [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] ATF agents responded to the scene and are continuing to work closely with local law enforcement on the ground. The Justice Department is investigating this attack as a hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism,” Garland added.
A security officer earlier denied the man entry to Edward Waters University, and local law enforcement was alerted, according to a notice from the institution. “The individual refused to identify themselves and was asked to leave,” said the statement, adding that the person “returned to his car without incident.”
The man donned a bulletproof vest and mask before heading to the Dollar General store “less than a mile” [1.6 kilometers] away and opening fire, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters explained.
Waters said the bullet-resistant vest-wearing shooter used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, with at least one of them painted with a swastika.
RACIAL MANIFESTO
By that time, the shooter’s father received a phone text message from his son, telling him to check his computer, Waters confirmed.
His parents then found several “manifestoes” written by the gunman for his parents, law enforcement, and the media, which showcased the shooter’s “disgusting ideology of hate,” Waters recalled.
Water said the shooter had once been involved in a 2016 domestic violence incident and was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for examination. He did not provide further details on those incidents.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the “entire Justice Department extends its deepest condolences to the loved ones of the victims and to the Jacksonville community as they mourn an unimaginable loss.”
He stressed that “no person in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence, and no family should have to grieve the loss of a loved one to bigotry and hate.”
He recalled that one of the Justice Department’s “first priorities upon its founding in 1870 was to bring to justice white supremacists who used violence to terrorize Black Americans.” That, he said, “remains our urgent charge today. The Justice Department will never stop working to protect everyone in our country from unlawful acts of hate.”
The shooting happened one day before the 63rd anniversary of one of Jacksonville’s most notorious racist incidents, “Ax Handle Saturday.”
BLACKS DETAINED
A group of Black protesters were conducting a peaceful sit-in at a city park to protest the Jim Crow laws that kept them out of white-owned stores and restaurants. That’s when they were attacked by 200 members of the extremist Ku Klux Klan group who hit them with bats and ax handles as police stood by.
Only when members of a Black street gang arrived to fight the Klansmen did the police intercede, but only Black people were arrested, according to historical records.
Saturday’s attack in a predominately Black neighborhood also evoked fears of shootings targeting Black Americans this century, including at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 and a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Buffalo supermarket shooting is one of the deadliest targeted attacks on Black people by a White lone gunman in U.S. history. Ten people were killed by the gunman, who has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Saturday’s shooting happened five years to the day when a 24-year-old gunman killed two people and wounded 12 others at a 2018 Madden 19 e-games tournament in Jacksonville.
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