Friday, July 14, 2006

Hate Crime in S.C.

Why this isn't reported in the national news. There ought to be an outrage. Please click here

Here's the whole story:

Accused rapists have ties to KKK, investigators say

Jennifer Miskewicz on Clarendon Co. rape, stabbing as a hate crime
Jack Kuenzie interviews wife of one man accused in Manning rape, stabbing
Jack Kuenzie on investigation into Clarendon Co. rape, stabbing


(Manning) July 10, 2006 - Investigators now say the alleged sexual assault and stabbing of a teenage girl in Manning was a hate crime.

Jeremy Sweat and Dustin Evans are charged with raping and stabbing a 15-year-old girl one week ago.

Sweat and Evans are white. The alleged victim is black.

The sheriff says officers believe Sweat and Evans targeted her because of her race, and may have been targeting any African-American woman.

As a teenager, investigators say Jeremy Sweat liked the Ku Klux Klan.
Deputies showed News 10 a report from a camp for troubled teens in Louisiana, stating he "frequently makes references to his involvement in the KKK."

The 1997 report also said Sweat "threatens to kill specific staff members."

Since moving to Clarendon County a year ago, deputies believe Sweat's violent feelings grew.

"He doesn't make references to the KKK, but he does make references to the lack of value he places on the young woman's life. Basically he said, she's just a black whore-- no one's going to care about her," says Tommie Burgess.

Lieutenant Tommie Burgess says officers also believe Sweat and Evans raped a black woman from Summerton last month.

Both women said the men talked about killing them.

"The first victim ... They talked about throwing her to the alligators ... The second one, they discussed tying blocks to her legs and throwing her in the lake," Burgess says.

Investigators believe Sweat and Evans may have approached more black women. A group of girls told deputies the men came up to them at this Waffle House, and asked if they wanted to go to their house and drink beer. The girls said no.

As of Monday night, both men remained in jail after a judge denied bond.


Charges, background and timeline

21-year-old Dustin L. Evans was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and assault and battery with intent to kill. He was taken into custody without incident at approximately 9:05 Thursday morning at his mother's home in Manning. He's now at the Clarendon County jail.

Evans' wife says he'd been gone for three days, but gave up, saying he couldn't run anymore. "All he could do was cry. Like he was just really scared. He let them handcuff him. He didn't try to fight."

24-year-old Jeremy Shay Sweat was arrested last Monday afternoon and faces the same charges.

Investigators say inside the mobile home, the victim was choked and had her neck cut with a knife before she was repeatedly raped by the two men.

They then forced her into a shower, told her to turn around and began stabbing her. The teenager fell into the bathtub and played dead.

She played dead and overheard the men talking about getting some trash bags and dumping her body in a lake. That's when her attackers left.

Then she ran away, climbing over the back fence to get help next door. Oather Webster tells what happened next, "I could hear somebody stumbling and banging on the wall as they were going down the porch."

The girl was soaked in blood and pounding on Webster's house, begging to be let in, "I had this blood-soaked figure come bolting in the house."

"She was starting to go into shock. I'm assuming from loss of blood. I mean the amount of blood that she had left on the walls and the spot where she had sat in my dining area, was tremendous."

A sheriff's spokesman says the victim is recovering from her wounds, and doing well. Authorities said Thursday she has been released from the hospital.

The case will be prosecuted by the 3rd Circuit Solicitor's Office. As always, officials stress all defendants are innocent until proven guilty.

That's important to Evans' wife Crystal. Two years ago, Dustin Evans was a proud new father of his first child with Crystal, who's now pregnant with the couple's second baby. "He was a gentle guy. I mean he'll appear to be kind of rough to people, but he's really gentle. I mean, because of the tattoos and his body build, I mean he appears to look rough, but he's just always been real gentle."

Investigators say they have also linked Sweat and Evans to the rape of a 45-year-old Summerton woman June 20th. She was also black.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Jeremy Sweat, 24, who is white, told officers two days after the July 3 incident, that the victim, a black (15-year-old girl) female, was "someone society wouldn't care about, wouldn't be missed", said Lt. Tommy Burgess of the Clarendon County Sheriff's Department."

It is no surprise to me when reading this white man's comment that he would utter such a statement. The devaluation, the callous disrespect, the "killing of the black body" is deeply ingrained into the fabric of Amercan society.

America has a long history of using, marginalizing and destroying black women and girls. This inhumane treatment did not start recently, nor is it some new found aberration, but, it is as American as cherry pie, and as old as the history of this country.

The rape and abuse of black women started before black women set foot on this country's soil. In the slave pens set up on the Slave Coast, near what is present day Ghana, is Goree Island. Here the female slaves were kept in crowded pens. Before many of them would go through the infamous "Door of No Return", white slavers would rape them. After being forced into the holds of the slave ships, and leaving behind a life that many would never live again in America, more horrors awaited these innocent females, many of whom were virgins.

Once put aboard the slave ship, they were raped repeatedly by the white sailors as the ship sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. This crossing of the Atlantic Ocean sometimes took up to two to three months. And many of the young black females arrived in their new world, very visibly pregnant.

Once on the slave plantations, after having survived the monstrous Middle Passage, then being subjected to the indignity and the immoral prying hands of the slave auctioneer, and the lascivious eyes of the potential future master, black women were now in a hell from which there would be no escape for more than 400 years; a living death; an assault upon their body and diginty that no other race of women in America has ever suffered.

Raped and impregnated by white masters, the master's sons, the white overseers, and any white man who came to the planatation, sex for black women became something to dread and hate. White men then began their hateful lies of myth and distortion of the black woman's sexuality, lies they told over and over again to assuage their guilt for debasing an entire race of women. After centuries of raping black women during slavery, and decades of sexual abuse and rape during Jim Crow/segregation, white men proclaimed to the world that black women, they the victims of excess sexual abuse, were the promiscuous and wanton whores. That black women were inherently sexually aggressive and morally unchaste. That black women were morally lax and hyper-sexual. With these lies building generation after generation, how could they, the white men who started these hated lies about the sexual morals of the black woman, be faulted if they raped a black woman? How could any white man be blamed for raping a sexually wanton species of former human property? These beliefs put down strong and deep roots. Over eighty years after the end of slavery, the white anti-lynching activist Jessie Daniel Ames would remark on the continuing influence exerted by the mythology of black female lasciviousness:

"White men have said over and over...that not only was there no such thing as a chaste Negro woman--but that a Negro woman could not be assaulted, that it was never against their will."

And as the destruction of the black female's body had been underway for centuries, so had her mind.

Only God himself knows how cruel and vicious the daily assaults of rape, sexual abuse and sexual coercion have done to take a toll on the minds of black women during slavery and Jim Crow segregation. No one will ever know the pychological damage done to those many women.

Certainly no white men during slavery, or Jim Crow segregation cared or gave a damn.

Enshrined in public opnion, and enacted in law, the myth of the sexually loose black woman was sent forth from the lips of white men, spreading across the whole of America, and even all around the world.

At the beginning of the last century, through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and even well into the 1970s, rape of a black woman carried with it none of the harshness or punitive legislation that rape of a white woman carried.

White men who actually were convicted of raping a black woman received lesser sentences, if any sentence at all was given.

Ida B.Wells-Barnett, the great anti-lyching crusader and journalist, fought tirelessly to expose the hypocritical underbelly of the racist South in its rape and debauching of black women. In one case she publicized, a white man in Nashville, Tennesse, was convicted of raping a black girl, went to jail for only six months, and afterward became a detective in that city.

Such leniency would been inconceivable had the perpetrator been black and the victim white.

The world has now for a long time believed the black woman to be sexully promiscuous. In allwalks of life, many black women have horror stories to tell of being insulted by men who took it for granted that only because of her race or color of her skin, was a black woman to be considered an immoral creature, no better than a prostitute.

Dr. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioural science at UCLA, was not immune from the racism and sexism this society, and most of all men, have towards black women. While waiting for her family to come down to the hotel lobby at the hotel where they were staying, she started towards the elevator. Before she reached the elevator, she was given an insult that many black women know of all too well:

"I had gone through a lot of trouble, shopping first for the children and then for myself. My tailored emerald-green silk dress was made from fabric my husband had brought from Thailand, and my shoes were dyed to match. My nails and hair were done, and my outfit was topped off with a brand-new mink jacket that my husband had worked hard to buy for me.

"I was sharp.

"As I waited for the elevator to return my family to me, two young white men came out of the hotel bar and headed my way. When they got within earshot, one loudly exclaimed, "She must cost at least $100!" His companion laughed as they walked past what was left of me. I looked down at my clothes, trying for a minute to determine what was it about me that had given them the impression I looked like a hotel hooker and not simply a well-dressed wife and mother.

"My tears gleamed on the fur as I stood there with my head bowed. I knew that I had to pull myself together. I knew that my husband would be furious if he heard my story and would want to confront the men who left me feeling so devastated. My young children would be upset if I was upset. Our day of celebration would be spoiled. When the elevator finally arrived I looked shaken, but I managed to blame it on my excitement.

"It wasn't until the end of the day that I told my husband about my experience, and he was as angry as I'd anticipated.

"I never wore those shoes or that dress again."

But, these types of experiences for many black women don't just happen in hotel lobbies, or only in America. Once again, Dr. Wyatt was the victim of another "drive-by myth-of-the-bad-black-woman-assault":

"My husband and I were in Hong Kong walking down the street when an Asian man pointed at me and asked my husband where he could "buy one like that." A few choice words made the man turn and run in fear and embarassment, but the incident left me stunned and my husband once again, enraged. Why didn't I looked respectable even on the arm of a black man, "my" man?"

She continues to state that a black woman, no matter how decent she may be, no matter her station in life, whether going about her daily business, is always running the gauntlet of the sexually loose black woman. The gauntlet of lies started centuries ago by white men, and now are continued by men from all races, in their constant devaluation of black women:

"The stereotype of the promiscuous black woman persists whether we are standing at a bus stop with our children, on our way to church dressed in our Sunday best, studying in the library for a class, sitting in a business suit testifying before a congressional committee, or standing in a hotel lobby. Age, dress, appearance and even economic status have much less to do with our image than do race and gender."

So, we have this little 15-year-old black girl who was raped and stabbed by two white men.

How will the jury look at her when her day in court comes?

The 45-year-old black woman who was kidnapped and raped by these two men, a woman whose body they were going to weight down so as to throw her to the alligators to feed on, how will the jury look at her when her day in court comes?

Will they both be just two more black females who still have to run the gauntlet of all the lies, insults, distortions that are a legacy of the hatred started many centuries ago from white men's rape and abuse?

Will their assailants get just punishment for the horrible crimes committed against these two victims, or will it be business as usual in the justice system?

We shall see.

We shall see if a black woman can truly get justice in this country for the crpme of rape against her, and a crime of kidnapoing and attempted murder.

We shall see if a little innocent 15-year-old black girl who was raped, stabbed repeatedly, and left for dead, who made her way to safety and lived to tell of her brutal attack will get her day in court and when she does, will she be given the justice she so deserves?

We shall see if the words of Jeremy Sweat, that a little black girl was "someone society wouldn't care about, wouldn't be missed" will ring true on the day of his trial as a mockery to all that is just and right, or if America truly has come a long way in overhauling its hated image of seeing the black woman as less than human, still not worthy of human consideration.

We shall see.

Regina said...

I've put it on my blog and on Digg.com, so stop by and "digg" it.

The link is on my blog at:
http://expatjane.blogspot.com

La Reyna said...

To Expat,

Way to go. Thank you so much for publicizing the horrific hate crime targeting Black women in S.C.

It needs to be publicized all over America, not just in the South.

Stephanie

Anonymous said...

I would like to comment on your blog about Dustin Evans. I do not live in Manning S.C. however I have known Dustin around 3 years. I am very close to his wife's family and visit with her family very often. I will admit I was friends with him until this happened. I can not for the life of me figure out why he would have done something like this. He had a great life. And made some really bad choices.
I am in no way defending him but I am tring to get a grip on what really happened. I do know that Dustin had no ties to the KKK. Believe me most of his friends were black and while he did stay in trouble he was not racist. I also know that Jeremy Sweat was in and did believe in the values of the KKK. I know that both of them had a long criminal record. I guess you can say that Dustin was a follower and not a leader. What's really bad is Dustin had only known Sweat for about 3 weeks. I guess you just never know a person or what a person will do.
What Dustin did was very wrong and alot of people are now suffering. The victims who will always look over there shoulders and never really trust anyone are not alone. The family members,his wife and children will suffer equally as much. And last, let's not forget the one's who called him a friend. Put yourself in our place and imange how we feel. I am not defending him in anyway, I am just getting a grip on my feelings and how bad this really is. I also want everyone to see the truth and know how some of his friends feel.
I must say in ending my little blog that you are always innocent until proven guilty. I feel in my heart that he is guilty and my thoughts on that are as follows. If he was not a part of that he must be let go, but if he did it I HOPE HE NEVER STEPS FOOT OUTSIDE OF PRISON AGAIN! Anyone that could do something this bad and hateful should die and never get to see their family again.

May God Bless all of the victims who are suffering here!

Thank You for letting me post my thoughts. Brian,South Carolina

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