A U.S. Army veteran accused of fatally stabbing a 66-year-old man in New York City allegedly told police he traveled from Baltimore specifically to kill black men.
James Harris Jackson, 28, was allegedly caught on a security camera Monday thrusting a knife into Timothy Caughman’s chest and back several times. Caughman had been rummaging through the garbage outside of a Manhattan building when Jackson attacked him.
Bleeding profusely, Caughman managed to walk to a nearby police precinct. He was rushed to a local hospital where he later died, according to WPIX TV.
A little more than 24 hours after the stabbing, Jackson allegedly marched into the Times Square NYPD substation and turned himself in, saying he was planning to attack an interracial couple. He also allegedly revealed his hatred for black men dating white women motivated him to carry out Monday’s attack.
“You need to arrest me. I have the knife in my coat,” he told officers, according to the New York Daily News.
NBC New York reports that police recovered a 26-inch mini sword on Jackson’s body, which they believe was the weapon he used to kill Caughman.
According to Gothamist, Manhattan Chief of Detectives William Aubry told reporters Wednesday during an unrelated press briefing that Jackson took a Bolt Bus on Friday from Baltimore, Maryland to NYC. He spent the weekend in a Manhattan hotel before fatally stabbing Caughman on Monday.
“He was specifically intending to target male blacks for assault,” Aubry said. “He has been harboring these types of feelings for quite some time. For well over 10 years.”
Aubry said Jackson chose to execute his attack in New York because it’s the “media capital of the world” and wanted to make a statement.
The NYPD confirmed to Huffington Post that Jackson was arrested and charged with murder. NBC notes that while he was initially arrested on a second-degree murder charge, authorities want to classify the act as a hate crime and upgrade the charge to first-degree murder.
Jackson reportedly served in the U.S. Army in Germany and Afghanistan, before being honorably discharged in 2012.
Reading media reports of the incident, however, one would hardly know which of the two men was the cold-blooded killer and which was the victim. The New York Daily News—which has a history of smearing black suspects simply on the say-so of the NYPD—felt the need to mention the black victim’s prior, wholly irrelevant police record:
Coughman lived in transitional housing on West 36th Street that serves people with HIV/AIDS. Praxis Housing Initiatives holds a contract with the city. He has 11 prior arrests, including for marijuana, assault, resisting arrest and menacing.
What, one might ask, does this have to do with anything? The reader is provided with no indication of Jackson’s criminal record, or whether there was any attempt to find it out, but somehow the rap sheet of the murder victim was primed and ready to go.
Daily News reporters Rocco Parascandola, Aidan Mcloughlin and Graham Rayman also all-lives-matter the hate crime by inserting a non sequitur case of a black man driving up from Baltimore more than two years ago to kill cops: In December 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley traveled to the city from Baltimore and assassinated Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Brinsley had made anti-police statements on social media prior to the murders.
This is a bizarre journalistic choice that appears to be some kind of attempt at “balancing” the coverage, suggesting that there could be a bit of score-settling going on: Yes, this black man was senselessly murdered by a white supremacist, but some other black guy killed cops two-and-a-half years ago, so….
The New York Post would do one better, turning Coughman—again, let’s remember, the victim of a heinous, gratuitous hate crime—into the bad guy: Caughman, who has 11 prior arrests, walked for about a block after the stabbing and staggered into the Midtown South Precinct, looking for help. He died hours later after being rushed to a nearby hospital. Police sources said the career criminal was refusing to talk to police about the incident and acting combative before his death.
A homeless man is fatally stabbed by a Nazi with a 26-inch sword, simply because of the color of his skin, and the Post insists on calling him a “career criminal,” and accuses him of “acting combative” to police right before he had the audacity to bleed to death.
The bizarre inclusion of the victim’s criminal record probably explains why an AOL News report based on the Daily News article mistakenly attributed the priors to the person who is actually accused of the crime:
Jackson has 11 prior arrests, including for marijuana, assault, resisting arrest and menacing, according to New York Daily News.
It’s an understandable mistake–after all, we typically discuss the criminal pasts of suspects, not victims.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-harris-jackson-murder-timothy-…http://fair.org/home/black-man-stabbed-to-death-by-white-supremacist-the…
