If the designation “hate crime” had any real meaning, Frederick Demond Scott of Kansas City would be its poster boy. In 2016, Scott, then 21, shot six people without warning in six separate instances, five of them middle-aged white men, one a middle-aged white woman. All were minding their own business when assassinated by Scott. Several were walking their dogs.
After Scott’s arrest in 2017, court records revealed that three years earlier he had threatened to “kill all white people.” Despite their knowledge of this threat, Kansas City police “did not know if the shootings were racially motivated.” Woke Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker “saw no clear motive.” And the FBI, like the media, took no interest at all. Hate crime? What hate crime?
Eight years after the murders, Scott has still not gone to trial. Following an outburst in court in August 2024, he was committed to a Missouri state behavioral health program. Authorities have to decide whether he “should be sent to an inpatient behavioral health program or assigned outpatient treatment.” Outpatient?
To understand how perverse is the application of “hate” to a given crime no better case presents itself than that of father Greg and son Travis McMichael. As I documented in detail in a recent Substack article, Greg and Travis were involved in the February 2020 Georgia shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, a chronic thief and troublemaker with documented mental-health issues.
After reviewing the evidence, including a video of the shooting, local District Attorney George Barnhill chose not to bring charges. The McMichaels, Barnhill argued, “were following, in ‘hot pursuit’ a burglary suspect, with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop. It appears their intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia Law this is perfectly legal.” No new evidence surfaced to contradict Barnhill’s opinion.
What did surface was a media-driven, politically motivated mob. Under mounting pressure, State of Georgia officials took control of the case from the local officials and arrested the McMichaels for murder on May 7, 2020.
The pressure would only grow. Weeks after the arrest of the McMichaels, George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. The effect on all racially charged trials everywhere in the United States was profound. Georgia was no exception. In November 2021, the McMichaels were convicted of murder. On January 7, 2022, Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced father and son to life without parole.
As famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the conviction in Georgia courts of accused murderer Leo Frank a century earlier, “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.” Human nature has not changed.
While the state case moved forward, in April 2021 President Biden’s Department of Justice launched a criminal hate crime case against the McMichaels. Once convicted on state charges, and expecting no justice from the Feds, the McMichaels pleaded guilty to the federal charges.
Their motive was self-preservation. As the Washington Post reported, “The McMichaels were concerned that the Georgia state prison system would be particularly unsafe, given the racial nature of their crime and the fact that Gregory McMichael was a former police officer.”
That is exactly why Arbery’s vengeful mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, “spoke out forcefully against the agreement.” She wanted to see the McMichaels exposed to racial retribution in prison.
It should be noted that Ms. Cooper-Jones had once called 911 to report on Arbery’s troubled behavior. She confessed to being frightened of a son who had been diagnosed with “Schizoaffective Disorder.” No matter, in an embarrassing turn of events, the DoJ capitulated to Cooper-Jones, threw out the contract it had signed with the McMichaels, and forced them to trial.
“It was important that this murder was prosecuted for what it was — a brutal and abhorrent racially-motivated hate crime.” If anyone committed a brutal and abhorrent racially-motivated hate crime it was Frederick Demond Scott. At worse, the McMichaels were guilty of impolite texts and jokes.
Greg McMichael, a U.S. Navy veteran and retired chief investigator for the Glynn County district attorney’s office, was not even guilty of that. As his attorney pointed out in his appeal, “Despite three decades in law enforcement, no evidence was presented at trial showing that Gregory McMichael had ever been the subject of any formal complaint involving excessive force or racially insensitive conduct directed at suspects, defendants, or co-workers.”
“It also should be noted,” said the attorney, “that the Government presented the jury with no evidence that Gregory McMichael uttered the “n-word” or other racial epithets against African Americans.” The DoJ press release that announced the sentences shed no light at all on why Greg was charged with a hate crime.
The release notes “that Travis had for many years associated Black people with criminality and had expressed a desire to see Black people particularly those he viewed as criminals harmed or killed,” but says not a word about Greg.
Despite the absence of evidence against Greg and the shallowness of the evidence against Travis, the DoJ insisted “that the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that race formed a but-for cause of the defendants’ actions on Feb. 23, 2020 — meaning that, but-for Arbery being
Black, the defendants would not have assumed he was a criminal, chased him down, and shot him.”
This was an outrageous conclusion, based on deliberately manipulated evidence. The neighborhood was admittedly “on edge.” Months before the shooting, Greg called 911. “We got a lot of break-ins in this area out here, automobile break-ins,” he told the dispatcher. He had discovered a “shady looking fellow” living under a nearby bridge. The man was white.”
On February 11, 2020, at 7:27 p.m., a nervous Travis called 911 for a second time. He had earlier called after someone stole a handgun from his truck. “We’ve got a string of burglaries in the neighborhood, and I just caught a guy running into a house being built,” he said.
“I turned my lights on him,” Travis writes from prison, “and was getting out of my vehicle to ask what he was doing when he pulled up his shirt and started reaching for his belt line. I got back in my car, and he ran into the house under construction. Anyone in my shoes would assume he was armed.”
Just weeks before the McMichaels’ fatal encounter with Arbery, a police officer showed the McMichaels security camera footage of Arbery rummaging through the house under construction and brainstormed ways to identify him. Said Greg’s appeals attorney, “Greg McMichael never uttered any racial epithet about Arbery or expressed any racial animus.”
Arbery was no “jogger.” He had been caught on security cameras casing the house under construction at least four times, usually at night. On the Sunday in question, Greg saw Arbery run by the house.
As Greg’s attorney explained, “Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator with decades of police experience, left his driveway… to initiate a pursuit of Mr. Arbery, not because Mr. Arbery was Black, but, rather, because he correctly identified Mr. Arbery as the individual he had seen on the home security footage.”
Without being asked, neighbor Roddie Bryan joined in the pursuit in his own truck. At one point, Arbery reached out and tried to yank open Bryan’s door, leaving a mark on the vehicle. Standing in the truck bed to ease his recently replaced hip, Greg saw the encounter from a distance.
Travis stopped the vehicle to give Greg his cell phone to call 911. Now, Arbery was running toward their truck. Bryan, following behind Arbery, recorded the critical sequence on his cell phone while driving.
The viewer first sees Arbery running, his pace almost casual. Alarmed by Arbery’s earlier behavior, Travis had dismounted from the truck and was standing by the open left front door with a shotgun at his side, pointing at the ground. This was the weapon he happened to be cleaning when the pursuit started. A boarding officer during his time in the Coast Guard, Travis was well trained in its use.
Greg, standing in the truck bed, held the phone up against his ear with one hand, his revolver in the other hand. ”I’m out here at Satilla Shores,” Greg told the dispatcher. “There’s a black male running down the street.” He then shouted at Arbery, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!” He then dropped the phone. No racial epithets from either Greg or Travis were recorded on that call.
Approaching the truck from the rear, Arbery had seen Travis on the left side and headed around the right. Arbery chose not to flee into an unfenced green space on his right, nor to wait for the police to arrive. Instead, on a suicidal impulse, he abruptly turned left at the front of the truck, headed towards Travis at full speed, and grabbed the barrel of his shotgun.
Caught off guard, Travis found himself engaged in a life and death struggle for the gun. After two shots had been fired, Arbery let go of the gun with one hand to punch Travis in the head, the fifth or so time he struck him. Now, the third shot was fired, this one fatally. It’s all on video for anyone who cares to see.
In the era of George Floyd justice, the mob got its way. So did the media. And so did Arbery’s mom. Thanks to her intervention, Greg and Travis have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives under constant threat of death in a Georgia state prison.
As to Fredrick Demond Scott, the jury is still out, but if he comes to an outpatient center near you, try not to pre-judge him by the color of his skin. There may be consequences.
Image: Jackson County Prosecutors Office
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