Man attacked and beaten in Southeast Texas believes race is a factor

[BMTSoulja1]

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I know this is not local news, but figured I’d put it here since the gentleman is a SETX man.  Thoughts, fellas?

[baddog]

3 hours ago, BMTSoulja1 said:

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I know this is not local news, but figured I’d put it here since the gentleman is a SETX man.  Thoughts, fellas?

I think it was racially motivated like a lot of your threads. 

[BMTSoulja1]

3 minutes ago, baddog said:

I think it was racially motivated like a lot of your threads. 

I was really looking for thoughts on this.  Really no need to be a jackarse.  Personally, I was reserving judgement until I see a video confirming what he said was told to him.  In this case, it could easily just be a situation where racism was just thrown out there.  

[baddog]

I used to give a white guy, who lived in Beaumont’s north end, a ride to work with me to Port Arthur. He ended up getting another job so the ride share was over. I heard of him waiting on another share ride when he was jumped by 4 black guys. They beat him up pretty good. It never made the papers. 
 

Thoughts?

[Ty Cobb]

I think it boils down to this, there are sorry people in this world regardless of what they look like.  There is hate in this world regardless of what the person looks like.  There is racism in this world and, like it or not, there always will be.  In both of these scenarios listed above there were sorry people with hate in their heart.  And quite possibly, both scenarios could have racism involved but we will never know and we can't prove it.

[BMTSoulja1]

33 minutes ago, Ty Cobb said:

I think it boils down to this, there are sorry people in this world regardless of what they look like.  There is hate in this world regardless of what the person looks like.  There is racism in this world and, like it or not, there always will be.  In both of these scenarios listed above there were sorry people with hate in their heart.  And quite possibly, both scenarios could have racism involved but we will never know and we can't prove it.

I’m out of likes!!!

[tvc184]

Going by the article with accompanying video, the evidence appears to be overwhelming that it was an assault. I am curious about the cell phone video evidence but I am reasonably  certain the suspect probably was motivated by race and use racial slurs.

If he actually needs surgery, that might enhance the crime from Assault to Aggravated Assault. 

[LumRaiderFan]

1 hour ago, tvc184 said:

Going by the article with accompanying video, the evidence appears to be overwhelming that it was an assault. I am curious about the cell phone video evidence but I am reasonably  certain the suspect probably was motivated by race and use racial slurs.

If he actually needs surgery, that might enhance the crime from Assault to Aggravated Assault. 

If the cell phone evidence couldn't prove that a racial slur was used, would this lessen the crime and punishment of what this scumbag did?

[mat]

I don't know the law, but a misdemeanor change much to little.

[tvc184]

8 minutes ago, LumRaiderFan said:

If the cell phone evidence couldn't prove that a racial slur was used, would this lessen the crime and punishment of what this scumbag did?

That could be a yes or no answer. Evidence of a crime is whatever can be brought to the witness stand. It can be physical evidence or it can be testimony. A jury is given the task to determine what weight any evidence has.

In Texas a hate crime it’s not a crime in  itself. It is like conspiracy to commit a felony, an attempted crime or organize crime laws. Those laws are not crimes and have to be attached to other laws either to enhance or lower penalties. To that extent, bias crimes in Texas can be enhanced to a higher level. For example a class A misdemeanor carries up to a year in the county jail but has no minimum. If a jury finds it was due to bias, it has a minimum of 180 days but still a one year maximum. Other crimes to be raised one level such as a B misdemeanor if deemed a hate crime by a jury, can become an A misdemeanor.

So to your question, would lack of a video lessen the crime or punishment? Again, yes or no. The law gives no specifics what can be used to prove a crime although there are some limitations such as hearsay for example. Even if there was no video and the DA decided  to attempt enhancement of the penalty due to bias, he could do so on testimony from the victim or witnesses. On the other hand, even if video did show a racial slur, a jury could determine that there was an assault but it was not because of bias and that the racial slur was simply an anger reaction. I don’t hate women in any profession or position in life but I can think of some pretty bad names to call them if I was mad. Does that mean I am biased? That is why the answer could be yes or no whether there is video or not. The DA has the authorityi  to prosecute for a hate crime enhancement with no video if he wishes or if such a video existed, a jury could give the verdict that it was not a hate crime. 

Whether a DA attempts to enhance a penalty in this case due to racial bias is completely on him. The weight given to any such evidence, is completely on the jury.

You ask a very good question but here is the true answer. Will the DA go to trial for a hate crime if he does not have the video as evidence, particularly if there is only the defendant and the victim as witnesses? It comes down to what we call he said/she said. It is your word against mine and in my experience, most of the time the DA will not bring such an argument to the table.

Let’s play the what if game. What if there is video of the man assaulting the victim as  claimed in this case? The video is shot from the perspective of the victim. As such, he controls when the video starts and I believe in the article, he said he started it “after” he suspects started advancing on him. Okay…. What if the claimed victim was using racial slurs towards a suspect, flipping him off, etc.?  Once he got the reaction he wanted, then he started videoing.  Does that change it?

I doubt that happened but that is why it is best to wait for all evidence to come out. How many times do we watch football games and a player will shove another player but the referee only sees the retaliation? 

[LumRaiderFan]

17 minutes ago, tvc184 said:

That could be a yes or no answer. Evidence of a crime is whatever can be brought to the witness stand. It can be physical evidence or it can be testimony. A jury is given the task to determine what weight any evidence has.

In Texas a hate crime it’s not a crime in  itself. It is like conspiracy to commit a felony, an attempted crime or organize crime laws. Those laws are not crimes and have to be attached to other laws either to enhance or lower penalties. To that extent, bias crimes in Texas can be enhanced to a higher level. For example a class A misdemeanor carries up to a year in the county jail but has no minimum. If a jury finds it was due to bias, it has a minimum of 180 days but still a one year maximum. Other crimes to be raised one level such as a B misdemeanor if deemed a hate crime by a jury, can become an A misdemeanor.

So to your question, would lack of a video lessen the crime or punishment? Again, yes or no. The law gives no specifics what can be used to prove a crime although there are some limitations such as hearsay for example. Even if there was no video and the DA decided  to attempt enhancement of the penalty due to bias, he could do so on testimony from the victim or witnesses. On the other hand, even if video did show a racial slur, a jury could determine that there was an assault but it was not because of bias and that the racial slur was simply an anger reaction. I don’t hate women in any profession or position in life but I can think of some pretty bad names to call them if I was mad. Does that mean I am biased? That is why the answer could be yes or no whether there is video or not. The DA has the authorityi  to prosecute for a hate crime enhancement with no video if he wishes or if such a video existed, a jury could give the verdict that it was not a hate crime. 

Whether a DA attempts to enhance a penalty in this case due to racial bias is completely on him. The weight given to any such evidence, is completely on the jury.

You ask a very good question but here is the true answer. Will the DA go to trial for a hate crime if he does not have the video as evidence, particularly if there is only the defendant and the victim as witnesses? It comes down to what we call he said/she said. It is your word against mine and in my experience, most of the time the DA will not bring such an argument to the table.

Let’s play the what if game. What if there is video of the man assaulting the victim as  claimed in this case? The video is shot from the perspective of the victim. As such, he controls when the video starts and I believe in the article, he said he started it “after” he suspects started advancing on him. Okay…. What if the claimed victim was using racial slurs towards a suspect, flipping him off, etc.?  Once he got the reaction he wanted, then he started videoing.  Does that change it?

I doubt that happened but that is why it is best to wait for all evidence to come out. How many times do we watch football games and a player will shove another player but the referee only sees the retaliation? 

Appreciate the answer, TVC, one more.

You said earlier if he needed surgery, it could be possibly upgraded from assault to aggravated assault.  Is aggravated assault determined by extent of injuries only?   

 

[tvc184]

30 minutes ago, mat said:

I don't know the law, but a misdemeanor change much to little.

It depends. From just a new story it appears that he suffered what is usually considered a class A misdemeanor assault or in the Penal Code, an assault with bodily injury. Under the Texas hate crime law, a class A misdemeanor cannot be enhanced to a felony. 

An Assault could be upgraded to an Aggravated Assault but there are two ways to make that under Texas law. One way is to use a deadly weapon and the other way is to cause serious bodily injury. I have not seen any claim of a weapon so assuming there was none, it goes to serious bodily injury. That is not defined as how it looks. If a person slapped you on the arm and you said you felt pain, it would be the same penalty as getting a blackeye and a busted nose. It is all considered bodily injury. Serious bodily injury is an injury that causes death, could cause death or there protracted/extended loss of a bodily  member or organ. So a broken arm in my opinion would be serious bodily injury because for four weeks, you will lose the use  of that arm because it will be in a cast. If a person gives you a blackeye but it causes your eyes to be shut for two weeks, could a jury consider that a serious bodily injury? I think they might. If you had broken bones in your face due to such an assault and a surgery to repair the damage caused you to have a patch on your eye for a month, would that be considered serious bodily injury under loss of an organ for an extended period?

Just from appearance this appears to be bodily injury only but the video said the man would need surgery to repair the injury. If that is true, I suspect that the man arrested will have the charges enhanced from merely bodily injury to serious bodily injury and therefore Aggravated Asssault.

It will depend on the extent of the injuries. 

[tvc184]

2 minutes ago, LumRaiderFan said:

Appreciate the answer, TVC, one more.

You said earlier if he needed surgery, it could be possibly upgraded from assault to aggravated assault.  Is aggravated assault determined by extent of injuries?   

 

😀

I just answer that for mat. 

[LumRaiderFan]

Just now, tvc184 said:

😀

I just answer that for mat. 

lol, see that, thanks.

[tvc184]

34 minutes ago, LumRaiderFan said:

lol, see that, thanks.

Both of our posts ended with, “extent of the injuries“. 😂

[LumRaiderFan]

37 minutes ago, tvc184 said:

Both of our posts ended with, “extent of the injuries“. 😂

I impress myself by using proper legal jargon. 🙂

[SmashMouth]

12 hours ago, BMTSoulja1 said:

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I know this is not local news, but figured I’d put it here since the gentleman is a SETX man.  Thoughts, fellas?

Man… A lot of stuff going through my mind. I would like to withhold judgement until the cell phone recording content is known. It’s not fair to anyone until the truth is revealed. I will revisit once more evidence is uncovered. 

[BMTSoulja1]

39 minutes ago, SmashMouth said:

Man… A lot of stuff going through my mind. I would like to withhold judgement until the cell phone recording content is known. It’s not fair to anyone until the truth is revealed. I will revisit once more evidence is uncovered. 

My exact thoughts.

[SmashMouth]

24 minutes ago, BMTSoulja1 said:

My exact thoughts.

I will say this… The guy didn’t whip his own ass. Whether it was racially motivated or not, someone beat the hell out of him. 

[BMTSoulja1]

20 minutes ago, SmashMouth said:

I will say this… The guy didn’t whip his own ass. Whether it was racially motivated or not, someone beat the hell out of him. 

Facts!

[tvc184]

6 hours ago, SmashMouth said:

I will say this… The guy didn’t whip his own ass. Whether it was racially motivated or not, someone beat the hell out of him. 

Again, I think the guy in the story is more likely a victim. It is likely a racially motivated incident. Do we know what happened beforehand though? Does it matter? 

You have to get the whole story if at all possible. In this case it sounds like there are witnesses and hopefully disinterested so they are not choosing sides.  But…

Like many times, I’m going to refer back to experience. About 25 years ago I was making a family disturbance call where a woman or maybe her daughter called about her husband assaulting her.

Another officer and I (happened to be my best friend) showed up at about the same time in separate patrol units. Like what is routine if possible, we separated the man and the woman and my partner spoke with the woman in one room and I spoke with a man in another. After my friend/backup officer spoke with the woman, he came over and told me he was putting the man in jail. I asked why. Because he had assaulted the woman and she had a visible but slight injury.

 NOT SO FAST! The officer had a statement by a person who had a visible injury, named the person that assaulted her (husband) and legally the officer had probable cause to make a lawful arrest. Is that what happened? In fact it was… but…

Now the other side of the story. I had interviewed the man and got a few more details. He agreed that he caused injury to his wife.  So now we have somewhat  agreeing but somewhat conflicting stories on what happened. The other officer, like most people (not just cops), heard what certainly seemed like a plausible story and the husband  kind of agreed, he had injured his wife. Case closed!!

Without knowing the entire story from the other side, my partner basically wanted to take up for the woman because she had been assaulted by her husband. His immediate thought was, the husband is going to jail.

Here is the story I got from the husband. If I remember right his daughter was 16 years old and he caught her stealing a ring from the next-door neighbor, who was supposed to be her friend. I think his daughter was visiting  next door and snuck the ring out of the house. Daddy caught her with the ring and confronted her about where it came from. When he found the story, he made his daughter go next-door, give the ring back and apologize to the family. Awesome dad right?

He wasn’t finished however. He was going to use lawful corporal punishment under Texas law. So he went and got a switch and was wearing her butt out. Mama didn’t like it and jumped on his back and started clawing his neck. While he was still switching his daughter, with his free arm he kind of shoved her away while she was hanging on his back and gouging his neck. She fell off and got a slight bruise or red mark somewhere but I don’t remember where. Like maybe her forehead hit the door frame.

The man never attacked his wife, she was attacking him and he had visible gouges on his neck. Oops! Now where do we go? These are decisions that police officers have to make every day, in every city and no matter what happens, at least one side is not going to be happy and possibly both sides.

With this new information the other officer re-interviewed the woman and she pretty much confirmed the story. Well yes I was clawing my husband, I  did not want him switching our daughter. Daddy flat out told me with words something like, no daughter of mine is going to be a thief. Awesome dad right?

The husband did not want his wife in jail but they were still angry and we could not leave them together. So we basically had two options. Those were to arrest one person or get someone to leave the house for the day to hopefully prevent any further violence. One way or the other someone was leaving the house either in handcuffs or voluntarily to go spend time with a family member or something like that. I was the senior officer and made the decision that if anyone was going to jail, it was going to be the woman. My partner agreed…… once he got the entire story…. which is the point of this whole story. We confronted her and told her she had two options, she could leave the home with family members or she can leave the home and end up in the County Jail charged with assault. She called her family over and I mean her mother, her father and may be a couple of brothers. They were angry with the police (naturally) and it started getting pretty heated. There was no way the police were taking their daughter to jail and she was not going to leave the house. What we thought was a simple solution, nobody goes to jail and she spends a day with her mother and father turned out to almost be a small riot. So we called for  additional officers and two or three more showed up. This is where often police get blamed for escalating the problem and we were doing everything we could to get out of the problem. Once the officers arrived, we told the angry family that there were two options for them. They could take their daughter peacefully and go spend some time together or we were going to put her in jail and if anybody interfered, they would go to jail also. We also probably noted that injuring a police officer was up to 10 years in prison. They were not happy and 25 years later they are probably still cussing the police….. but they took their daughter out of the house and that was the last we heard of it. We also made a police report of the claimed assaults by the husband and wife as required by law and took photographs of a gouges on his neck and her slight injury also. As is typical with these kinds of calls, mostly people want the police to take their side but don’t want anything legally done such as filing charges. They basically want us to referee a fight and let the other side know they won the argument. 

This long winded story is just an example, until you know the entire story, you might have a hunch what is true but you may be wrong. I trust my good friend and partner and when he wanted to put the man in jail he was legally correct and the woman seemed like a sympathetic victim. He was caught up like most of us would be, in hearing a story that seems true, especially looking at visible injuries. Honestly, it most situations many of us would feel more sympathetic to the woman than the man anyway.

This is one of probably many examples I could give on where we need to get the entire story. In this particular case I had the advantage of about four years more experience. That still doesn’t necessarily keep me from making a mistake but experience sure helps.

So back to this case. As I have mentioned before, the guy that claims to be assaulted controlled the video. That means he started filming when he wanted to. That does not negate his story but was there more to it? Was he flipping off the other guy and yelling his own racial slurs? Did he challenge the man (suspect) and say something like, come over here and I’ll whip your butt!! When the suspet accepted the challenge and started marching toward the guy, is that when he started to video, conveniently leaving off his instigating the confrontation?  Could this be two people who voluntarily fought each other because both were angry? Could they have both been yelling racial slurs and profanity at each other? Did the claimed victim in this case voluntarily fight, maybe after he instigated it and he just lost the fight? Could this just be two guys fighting and not really a hate crime?

If I was going to bet on it, I would be about 99% sure that the man was assaulted and this at least had something to do with race. With witnesses, hopefully that will be cleared up shortly and if the  man is guilty, he will have the appropriate charges filed in him. I think maybe aggravated assault. 

People like to say there are three stories in every situation. You have one side, the other side and then the truth is somewhere in the middle. I understand what the saying means but it kind of makes me mad sometimes. It is possible in cases like this that the man assaulted told 100% of the truth and there is no other side. Until we know that however, we need to look at all sides. Like other people, I might not know what happened but I can still make reasonable assumptions so it’s not unfair to say the guy in the story certainly looks like the victim… But…

 

[SmashMouth]

Yep. Exactly my point ( except in a much more abridged format… 😂).

[tvc184]

5 hours ago, SmashMouth said:

Yep. Exactly my point ( except in a much more abridged format… 😂).

Do you know how much typing that is at 3 AM on an iPhone?????

No telling how many typos or wrong words are in there…… 

[SmashMouth]

1 hour ago, tvc184 said:

Do you know how much typing that is at 3 AM on an iPhone?????

No telling how many typos or wrong words are in there…… 

Well, if I'm being honest, I didn't find but a few hickeys here and there when I read it. Figured we could let one of the thin blue line slide this time...Lol.

[CardinalBacker]

Guy got beat up, no doubt.  The question is whether or not it was racially motivated.  Just because the perpetrator was white doesn't make it a hate crime.  

If you want to end racial violence, I'd support a 2 year mandatory minimum sentence for any attack on someone of another race.  You'd almost completely stop having attacks like this (or the reverse... black on white violence) overnight.  Except somebody would come along and point out that many more blacks are in prison because of the new hate crime punishment and suddenly the law would be racist because of the "disparate outcome."  

My biggest fear is that we're going to start seeing more and more of this.   I remember thinking back when that racist in SC shot up the black church that this might be the start of something ugly.  I don't understand how demonizing the entire white race (and system as a whole) is going to make young white kids feel warm and fuzzy towards people who are falsely accusing them of racism.  I was telling my dad back in 2012 that I was worried that someone would try to assassinate Obama.  His point was that anybody who felt strongly enough about race to want to kill somebody over it was likely too old to do anything about it.  I don't think he was wrong.  My fear is that the narratives being pushed today are obviously leading to more hatred and division, not reconciliation.  Nobody wants white kids to be "colorblind" anymore.  You have to accept that you are a filthy racist and everything that you've accomplished has nothing to do with your work ethic... it's because you're a dirty white racist.