(Warning: Graphic Language)
A teenager in Jackson, Mississippi has been charged with murder and another with aggravated assault for killing a black man and prosecutors say, it was a crime of hate.
18-year-old Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, 18, were looking for a black person to hurt and even kill when they left a party on June 26, Mississippi officials say.
“Let’s go fuck with some niggers,” Dedmon had reportedly said to friends.
The teens jumped into their large Ford F250 green pickup truck, drove from a white suburb to a largely black part of the town and beat up the first black person they saw, James Craig Anderson, 49, standing in a parking lot of a motel near his car.
When the beating was over, Dedmon, backed up the pickup truck, and ran over Anderson, killing him on the spot, Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith says.
“I ran that nigger over,” Dedmon allegedly told the other teens in a phone call.
“He was not remorseful,” Smith told CNN’s Drew Griffin. “He was laughing, laughing about the killing.”
“This was a crime of hate. Dedmon murdered this man because he was black,” Smith added. “The evidence will show that.”
Security footage from the motel caught the beating and killing on tape.
Dedmon has been charged with murder and faces a double life sentence. Rice has been charged with aggravated assault.
The other teens in the vehicle were not charged.
