FROM THE ARCHIVES: S.C. HATE CRIME: “SHE’S SOMEONE NO ONE WOULD MISS”

Accused rapists have ties to KKK, investigators say

Jeremy Shay Sweat

Dustin L. Evans

 

(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.

 

 

Reported by Jack Kuenzie & Jennifer Miskewicz with AP.

LINK:   http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5117336&nav=0RaP

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It does matter’
Sheriff’s Dept., NAACP talk through hate crimes
By Brian Jarvis

 BRIAN JARVIS/Manning Times

 

Chief Investigator Tommy Burgess of the Clarendon County Sheriff’s Dept. answers questions regarding recent assaults on two African-American women. Nearly 100 concerned citizens showed up for the joint meeting of the Clarendon and Manning chapters of the NAACP Sunday at the Society Hill A.M.E. Church.

The Manning and Clarendon branches of the NAACP deviated from their normal program Sunday to hear representatives from the Clarendon County Sheriff’s Dept. discuss a pressing concern: the sexual assault of two African-American women in the last month and whether the culprits responsible committed a hate crime.

 

“We’re all aware of recent events,” said Bobby Fleming, president of the Manning branch of the NAACP, to a packed house at the Society Hill A.M.E. Church. “What shocked me was hearing the comments of what was said by one of (the suspects).”

 

Jeremy Sweat, 24, of Quail Trail Circle and Dustin Evans, 21, of Raccoon Road, both white males, were charged with two counts each of kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct and battery with attempt to kill a 45-year old Summerton woman and a 15-year old girl from Manning less than two weeks later. Both crimes were noted for their brutal and serial nature, and one suspect claimed affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan.

 

“There’s definitely racial issues that we’re looking at,” said Chief Investigator Tommy Burgess, who first began to classify the attacks as hate crimes after a round table discussion with the U.S. Marshall Service and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

Outlining the chronology of events leading up to the July 3 assault, Burgess noted the Sheriff’s Dept. had one of the suspects in custody within 12 hours due to tip-offs from neighbors and residents.

 

“You would not believe the outpouring we’ve had from this community, and that’s what we need,” he said.

 

Burgess also said that during an interview, Sweat claimed that he placed little value on the lives of the targets because they were black and poor. Due to their race, the suspect felt, law enforcement would say the crimes simply didn’t matter.

 

“Well, folks, it does matter,” Burgess insisted. “These guys are violent. They don’t deserve to be on the street.”

 

According to Burgess, the attacks fit the description of a hate crime defined by the U.S. Congress in 1992 as “motivated by hatred or prejudice based on race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.”

 

Since the crimes became public, at least four African-American women and one Asian woman reporting being approached by the two men, and Burgess encouraged others to come forward as well.

 

“Yes, there’s a stigma attached. We’re trying to overcome that. We want to assure victims of their safety and get them the counseling they need. We want to heal them,” Burgess said. “But with (the suspects) being in jail, it’s not over. That’s just the first step. We’ve got to prosecute them and put them in prison where they belong so they can’t harm anyone else. That’s where I need the public and the community to come forward on these issues. I need your help to keep them where they need to be.”

 

According to the Sheriff’s Dept., Clarendon County has not had a hate crime since the church burnings that took place in the mid-1990s.

 

“We take a very stiff role against hate groups in this county and will continue to do so,” Burgess said.

While South Carolina has no specific laws for hate crimes, the state ranked third in the nation by number of active hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, fueling debate that it may be time to put a hate crime law on the books. In California, for example, hate crimes can tack on an additional 20 years to a sentence.

 

But in the case of Sweat and Evans, a hate crime classification will likely occur anyway thanks to a nationalized reporting system. As it stands, the suspects face prison sentences of well over a hundred years each.

 

When Henry King asked how to prevent such incidents in the future, Burgess suggested parenting classes such as the ones offered at the Manning Early Childhood Center.

“There are lots of programs out there that don’t cost a thing but aren’t being taken advantage of,” said Burgess, who also stressed that parents shouldn’t push their responsibilities onto schools.

 

“We have to take our children back,” Burgess said. “I have two young boys. I’m worried to death what they’re facing. But we’ve got to be positive and teach them while they’re young. I think a child is worth our time.”

 

When questioned if the assaults could inspire dormant hate groups to commit similar attacks, Burgess said the Sheriff’s Dept. had no knowledge of active hate groups in the area but stays on the lookout thanks to reports updated daily from the South Carolina Information Exchange.

 

Still, Burgess urged the community to come forward if they hear something, and never to assume their information is not valuable to law enforcement.

 

“It’s not an ‘I’ game, it’s a team game. All of us work together as a team,” Burgess said. “Call us, we want to hear from you.”

 

Elder Jack Nelson, who performs legal redresses for the Clarendon County NAACP, complimented the Sheriff’s Dept. afterwards for giving a stellar presentation.

 

“It was done very professionally in a way that eased tensions,” Nelson said. “South Carolina should give itself a hand for the improvements that it’s making. People are starting to treat each other like people. We’re all in the same boat, and we’ve got to have love and respect for each other to make a better society.”

 

But perhaps the most impassioned speech came from Dot Josey, wife of Sheriff Keith Josey, both of whom were in attendance.

 

“It’s our responsibility to our families to go out and tell 10 people what we learned today. One incident should not tear down our relationships,” Josey said. “Every day, our relationships get better. It’s not like the area was 50 or 100 years ago. Our children play together in school, we go to church together, spend holidays together. I can go to your home and feel safe and you can come to my home and feel safe. We need to teach it in our homes; don’t leave it to schools or Sunday school teachers. It might be the key to keep women from being harmed or to keep young men from losing their lives.”

 

Afterwards, Fleming said that he thought the meeting went well, adding that the local chapters of the NAACP and the Sheriff’s Dept. have enjoyed a long history of working together.

 

“We left with information we didn’t have before,” he said.

 

Fleming concurred with the Sheriff’s Dept. that the crimes were isolated incidents of racism and didn’t see cause for further alarm.

 

“It’s always a concern, but not at the present time,” Fleming said.

 

Also in attendance Sunday were State Senator John Land, Manning Mayor Kevin Johnson and County Auditor Patricia Pringle. House Representative Cathy Harvin was unable to attend but sent a letter of support and Julius Adger, president of the Clarendon County chapter of the NAACP, was in Washington, D.C. attending a national convention.

 

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This case first broke 2 years ago, on July 10, 2006, and it has dropped off the radar. I have not been able to find any recent developments on what has since happened, if the case went to trial, and how the brave and resourceful young lady is doing. I also have no way of knowing how the other victim, a black woman, is doing.

 

Many may have forgotten these two women who were raped, as well as the other victims, all of whom were raped and threatened with death because they are black women. But, I have not forgotten them.

 

Here are my comments on this sexist/racist hate done by these two humans who felt that because their victims were black that “no one would miss them”.

 

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“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.”

 

That this thing that walks upright and calls it self a man, this raper of a 15-year-old minor, would say this, says alot about many people’s views on the value and worth of black women in this country, or lack thereof. This devaluation of the worth of black women, this racist thought of thinking did not occur in a vacuum. It started when black women were brought to this country against their will, with the rapes of black women on slave ships, the rapes of black women during slavery, the rapes of black women during Jim Crow segregation, all the way up to the 1970s.

 

Raped and impregnated by white masters, the master’s sons, the white overseers, and any white man who came to the plantation, sex for black women became something to dread and hate. White men began their lies of myth and distortion of the black woman’s sexuallity, lies they told over and over again to assuage their guilt for debasing an entire race of women, and to justify their vicious wanton sexualized gendered race hatred against black women. After centuries of raping black women, 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 black women, be faulted if they raped a black woman? How could any white man be blamed for raping a sexually wanton species of former property? These beliefs put down strong and deep roots. Over eighty years after the end of slavery, the white anti-lynching activist Jesse 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 her will.”

 

 

At the beginning of and all the way through the middle of the last century, the rape of a black woman carried with it none of the harshness or punitive legislation that the rape of a white woman by a black man carried. And white men knew this and raped black women with impunity, knowing that they would not be given and public or legal condemnations for it:

 

 

“Southern whites saw to it that blacks had no alternative to the brutal reality of sharecropping. Their control extended to every area of life; white rape of black women was endemic, like heat and humidity, and victims had no recourse to the justice system. Winson Hudson, a movement leader born in Harmony, Mississippi, in the 1920s, recalls:

 

“Back then, white boys would rape you and then come and destroy the family if you said anything about it. You would just have to accept it. They were liable to come in and run the whole family off. I couldn’t walk the roads at anytime alone for fear I might meet some white man or boy. I couldn’t walk the street without some white man winking his eye or making some sort of sound. It made me so angry because I had five brothers, and I heard my father almost daily warn them against walking near a white girl or looking at them or going near a house unless they knew that white men were there too.”

 

“The End Of Blackness”, by Debra Dickerson“

 

Rape of little black girls was not unheard of either:

 

“I shall never forget this, and this is something nobody ever knew because we don’t tell it. I wouldn’t tell it now because it’s painful, it will be painful even to tell it, but with what you are doing, I’ll tell it. Some Sunday mornings we would get a mule and five or six of us would get the wagon…and go about six miles away to see my Uncle Chilton. Like I said, my sister was about nine or ten. Of course, I was driving, and she was sitting in the wagon. So we went by this house where these white guys were out there playing ball. I guess it was eight guys probably about 18, 19, 20 something like that.

 

“One of those white guys ran and jumped on the wagon. He said, “I’m going to ride with you, I’m going to ride.” We were going by this house …and he got on the back of the wagon, and he was riding with us. When we got to the house, he took the mule from me and stopped the mule at the house, took the wagon from me and tied the mule to a tree in the yard. Then he made my sister get out and go in the house with him.

 

“He raped my sister.

 

“Like I said, she was about nine at that time.”

 

Stine George and her little brother ran away and hid in the woods. Afterwards, they saw their sister driving the wagon by the wooded area they had hid in. She tells the rest of the incident that transpired:

 

 

“So about the time we got halfway back to Gum Branch, almost back where we could see the house, we heard the wagon going back down that road, running. See, what he had done, after he raped my sister, he told her to get into the wagon and go home. So she was driving the wagon and she went on home. She went by the house where my dad was, and all of them got out…They were alarmed. So finally they (the parents) had her…They finally called the sheriff, and of course, he didn’t do nothing. He did arrest this guy. We finally came out of the woods, and then we went back down to the house, and we didn’t have anymore trouble out of them, but they never didn’t, never do nothing to that guy for what he did.”

 

 

“Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans tell About Life in the Segregated South”, by William Chafe, et. al.

 

 

Rape, forced pregnancies, beatings, torture, murder,  were daily assaults upon black women all across the American South, and with the racist myths proclaimed by white men, and with the widespread societal devaluation of black women in American society, the idea of this man making this statement is of no surprise to me.

 

When, and if these two women even see this come to trial, it would not surprise me if the defense tears them apart on the witness stand. It would not surprise me if they are made out to be the ones who somehow brought this all on themselves.

 

After all, America’s degrading disrespect towards black women in a society that disregards their beauty and intrinsic worth would probably not give these two women their day of justice in court.

 

It very well may prove me wrong.

 

But, I remain in serious doubt that these two women will get the justice they deserve.

 

After all, they are just black women.