Four Americans have been charged with hate crimes after the alleged torture of a mentally disabled man, streamed on Facebook Live.
Tesfaye Cooper, 18, Tanishia Covington, 24, Jordan Hill, 18, and Brittany Covington, 18, were each charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and residential battery.
Hill was also charged with robbery and possession of a stolen motor vehicle.
According to CNN, at one point the Facebook Live video shows one attacker taking a knife to the victim’s head and carving off a patch of his scalp.
The teen was later found wandering around Chicago in distress on Thursday, and was transported to hospital in a stable condition.
At one point, the suspects, who are black, told the victim, who is white, to say “fuck white people” and “fuck Donald Trump“.
Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a press conference on Thursday that while all four of the suspects made “terrible racists statements” against white people, it does not appear to be racially motivated. Instead, he said police believe the victim was targeted because he has mental disabilities.
Within hours, #BLMKidnapping was trending on Twitter as members of the far right attempted to claim that this horrific attack was sanctioned by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Obviously, Black Lives Matter condemned the attacks, and accused those claiming it was BLM-sanctioned as wanting to “sensationalise this and use it as a justification to generalise and criticise.”
“What happened to the young man who was held captive and tortured is terrible and we condemn the violence that was perpetrated against him,” the BLM Chicago group wrote on Facebook. “We’ve stated time and time again, that we’re against all types of harm and violence perpetrated and we’ve never condoned it. So this is absolutely perplexing and twisted that people are associating this atrocity with this organisation and movement.”
It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the “BLM Kidnapping” have nothing to do w/ the movement.
— deray mckesson (@deray) January 5, 2017
The suspects will appear in court on Friday.
Photo: Chicago Police.
