Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
Tasha Hill told jurors that her 7-year-old daughter is still traumatized by the beating she received from Troy Dale West after she chastised him for opening a Cracker Barrel restaurant door and nearly hitting her daughter.
"I pulled her back and said to the man, 'Hey sir, you need to watch out. You almost hit my daughter in the face,"' Hill said in testimony.
After those words, West, who is White, allegedly punched her in the face, kicked her as she yelled to the ground and yelled racial epithets. All of this occurred, Hill said, even as she tried to explain that she was a veteran and as her daughter screamed in horror at the site of her mother being beaten.
"I heard my daughter screaming, 'Mommy! Mommy!"' Hill said. "I was scared. I didn't know why it was happening."
Hill said she missed three months of work because of the beating, suffers from depression and required therapy afterward. Hill said her daughter is now scared of white men.
But West and his attorney claim that Hill spit on the man and has a violent history of confrontations. My Fox 5 writes that West's attorney, Tony Axam, "aired an audio recording for jurors depicting a raging Hill yelling profanities during an argument with neighbors."
"I felt very threatened," Hill said of the incident, which she said occurred after her home was broken into over the summer. "I was angry."
Axam then brought up a March 2005 incident at a metro Atlanta shopping mall. Hill was arrested for making terroristic threats after telling a woman "I'll cut you" when the woman stepped on her foot. Axam also mentioned that Hill was arrested as a college student after she was accused of keying a girlfriend's car.
Hill said she pleaded guilty to the charges to get out of jail.
Axam also showed video of the attack which he says showed that West did not grab Hill as she claims.
That's all well and good. Hill may have a temper and maybe she wasn't grabbed. But if that video shows a man beating and kicking a woman while her child looks on, and if he yelled racial slurs, then he is guilty of a heinous crime, possibly a hate crime.
West was charged with aggravated assault, false imprisonment, battery and other charges for the September 2009 incident. It seems that Hill's race was a primary motivating factor in West's alleged response to her.
Even if Hill yelled, that was no excuse for West to beat her. Men are physically stronger than women and he should have never placed a hand on her. If she did spit on him as he claims, he should have gone to police and filed charges against her.
Can you imagine the uproar from the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh if there was video of a black man beating a white woman over nonsense? They'd probably put the tape on a nonstop loop as they further pushed their theories of reverse racism against whites by blacks in this country. It is a phenomena that started, oddly enough, after this country elected its first president of African descent.
That said, Hill's history of incidents suggests that, aside from this event, she may need to seek some anger counseling. Getting too loud with the wrong person can unfortunately, lead to unjustified violence. We need to take the Biblical concept of loving our neighbors to heart. And our neighbor is not just your friend or someone who looks like you.I can't tell you how many people I see walking around who are ready to pounce at the slightest perceived slight. Just today I was on a crowded subway train as one woman snapped at people for brushing against her as they tried to exit. If you are on a crowded train, its inevitable that someone is going to brush against you. Why not be a good neighbor and deal with five seconds of inconvenience? It would have made for a better ride for everyone.
However, even if Hill had a terrible attitude that day, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
Part of the problem in this case is that the jury does not resemble the county where the incident took place. The jury is made up of nine whites and three blacks but the county where the trial is taking place is more than 60 percent white. I hope the jurors see beyond race and look at the fact that a man allegedly brutally beat a woman, that another human being brutally beat another human being.
That's wrong regardless of color.