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Alton L. Hayes of Oak Park, Il. approached a 19-year-old white male walking in a neighborhood around 1 a.m. on April 17. Oak Park Police say that Hayes attacked the victim from behind, pushed him against a wall, threatening him with a tree branch. He then demanded that the victim hand over his belongings and reached into the man’s pockets.

Hayes was eventually caught by local law enforcement authorities soon after.

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The Tribune has more:

“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the crime was related to the victim’s race,” said Reynolds.

Police said the alleged offenders were black and the victim was white.

Reynolds, however, would not comment if the crime had anything to do with the Martin shooting, but Conklin said Hayes told the investigators that he was angry about the Martin shooting and decided to attack the victim because of his race.

We are sure that Trayvon’s parents would not want Black folks using reverse racism in honor of their slain son. See the Chicago Tribune for more.

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The brothers, who are white and Jewish, have claimed self-defense, saying the teen was holding a nail-studded board. Local civil rights activists hope the Martin case will draw more attention to what they believe was racial profiling by neighborhood watch vigilantes.

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Eliyahu and Avi Werdesheim are accused of beating a 15-year-old boy who was walking through a Baltimore neighborhood in November 2010. The brothers pulled up next to the teen in a vehicle, then got out and “surrounded him,” according to charging documents. The passenger threw the teen to the ground and the driver hit him in the head with a hand-held radio and patted him down.

The teen remembered the driver yelling, “You wanna (mess) with us, you don’t belong around here, get outta here!” according to court documents, which do not identify which brother was driving.

Eliyahu Werdesheim told the Baltimore Jewish Times that he was acting in self-defense because the teen was holding the piece of wood. The teen picked up the board during the encounter, but put it back down, said J. Wyndal Gordon, an attorney for the teen’s family. He said the family did not want to speak publicly.

After the trio left, the teen called police and was taken to a hospital with a cut on the back of his head and a broken wrist, according to court documents. Using a photo book compiled by investigators, the teen later identified Eliyahu Werdesheim, now 24, as one of the men who assaulted him. He was arrested after about 10 days; his now 21-year-old brother was charged two months later.

The brothers are charged with second-degree assault, false imprisonment and carrying a deadly weapon (the hand-held radio). The pair face up to 13 years in prison if convicted on all three counts. A third man, identified in a lawsuit brought by the teen’s family as Ronald Rosenbluth, does not face charges.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said investigators don’t believe Rosenbluth was involved in the beating. Rosenbluth said he doesn’t believe there was a third person and he was only called to the scene after the incident.

Law enforcement officials emphasize that neighborhood watchers’ responsibility is to report crime, and leave interventions to police. Most follow the rules, and confrontations are rare.

“We owe a lot of our success to communities that have stepped up and partnered with police. They help us out,” Guglielmi said. “But when they step too far, we have to hold people accountable.”

In the Florida case, authorities charged neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman this month with second-degree murder in Martin’s death Feb. 26. Zimmerman claims self-defense, but Martin’s family claims he targeted Martin mainly because he was black. Zimmerman’s father is white and his mother Hispanic.

It’s unusual to have a trial in which the allegations mirror a case so prominent in the news, said Steven Levin, a former federal prosecutor.

“Since the Trayvon Martin case, people cannot help but think about that case and draw comparisons, whether they are fair or not,” he said.

While the case has not garnered the attention the Martin shooting has, Cortly C.D. Witherspoon, president of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has organized protests outside the courthouse during court hearings and has been frustrated by the postponements.

“We feel that justice should have been served long ago. I would contend that the urgency for justice (in this case) is affected by the Trayvon Martin case because of the similarities,” he said.

Members of the area’s Jewish community also rallied outside the courthouse when the brothers appeared in court to enter not guilty pleas in February. Jakob Lurman, the owner of a barbershop, was among them.

“I have a business in the community. Shomrim do good work,” Lurman said. “I don’t know what happened in that case, but I wanted to show support.”

Jewish neighborhood watch groups in New York City have faced accusations of unnecessary force against blacks, creating tensions between the Jewish and black communities. That hasn’t yet happened in Baltimore, according to the Rev. Alvin Gwynn Sr., president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. The organization of predominantly black clergy met with leaders of the area’s Jewish community to keep relationships between the two communities strong.

“We were already working with them when this came up,” Gwynn said. “It hasn’t done much damage yet.”

Baltimore is a city that’s 64 percent black, and the jury will likely have eight or nine black members. So race will be a factor, said University of Baltimore School of Law professor and practicing attorney Byron Warnken.

“What the defense has to do is completely downplay that,” he said, and show the force was necessary to prevent a crime.

Charles Cannon

The jury decided that their attack of the victim at a bus stop in downtown Houston violated the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act enacted in October 2009.

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Matthew Shepard, 22, was a gay, White man who was brutally tortured, pistol-whipped then left for dead because of his sexual orientation on October 6, 1998. James Byrd, Jr., 48, was a Black man tied to a pick-up truck by three White supremacists on June 7, 1998, who then dragged him along an asphalt road until his body struck the edge of a culvert, severing his arm and head.

The defendants in this case were identified as White supremacists by their tattoos. They were also heard screaming racial slurs as they beat their victim, according to a witness who called 911. All men face a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Today’s convictions under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act show that hate crimes are far too common in this country,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division.  “The department will continue to use every available tool to identify and prosecute hate crimes whenever and wherever they occur.”

The sentencing is scheduled for July 16, 2012.

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UPDATE: 11:46 A.M. EST

CNN reports that two white males suspected of shooting five black people, killing three and wounded two, in a mostly African-American neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma were ordered held on more than $9 million bail each.

Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 33, will face charges today that could include first degree murder and attempted murder. Authorities are determining whether race played a role in the shootings.

When CNN tried to interview the family of one of the suspects, they were greeted with hostility. Watch the video and see for yourself.

UPDATE: 11:07 A.M. EST

The Daily Mail UK Reports:

Jake England, 19, and his friend and alleged accomplice Alvin Watts, 32, both white, face murder charges over the shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma that killed three and left two wounded.

On Thursday, two years after Carl England was killed, Jake England took to Facebook to rage about the ‘f****** n*****’ who shot his father to death.

Later that night, England and Watts drove through black neighborhoods in northern Tulsa in a white pickup truck and gunned down five strangers near the spot where England’s father died, according to police.

See screenshots of England’s Facebook page here.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

TULSA, Okla. — Police backed by a helicopter arrested two white men early Sunday and said they would face murder charges in the recent shootings that terrorized Tulsa and left three people dead and two others critically wounded, all black.

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Tulsa police spokesman Jason Willingham said the two men were arrested at a home just north of Tulsa at 1:47 a.m. Sunday and they were expected to face three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of shooting with intent to kill after a spate of shootings early Friday. He said police acted on an anonymous tip and went to one location and followed the suspects after they had traveled about a half mile on foot to another place where they were apprehended. He declined to characterize that as a pursuit.

While police identified the men as white, authorities declined to discuss the circumstances of the shootings nor questions raised in the community about race.

“There obviously still is a lot of investigation” ahead, Willingham told The Associated Press by telephone. “We don’t’ have a motive at this time. We are still asking questions and hopefully that will become clear in coming days.”

Willingham identified the men in custody as 19-year-old Jake England and 32-year-old Alvin Watts, and gave no hometowns for them. He said the two men were taken early Sunday for questioning at a downtown Tulsa police station. He said they would be booked and jailed and more details would be provided at a news conference later in the afternoon.

It was not known if either man arrested had obtained an attorney early Sunday.

Police had said previously that they didn’t believe the victims knew one another and they were trying to determine the circumstances behind the killings. Black community leaders met Friday evening in an effort to calm worries about the shootings, which had alarmed the predominantly black north Tulsa area.

Police, in their initial statement announcing the arrests via email, signaled many questions remained about the shootings early Friday.

Willingham said the investigation is still very active.

“We are going to turn over every rock,” Willingham said of the work of a task force of various law enforcement groups and local police.

Willingham said the arrests followed a crimestoppers tip on Saturday but he declined to specify what that information was. But he said authorities began moving to make the arrests satuday evening on the basis of the tip.

“This evolved pretty rapidly,” he said, adding a special operations team and a fugitive operations group were part of the arrest work.

“We’ve been on them since early in the evening (of Saturday). We had been doing surveillance and using a helicopter,” he told AP.

Asked if the two men were armed when they were taken into custody, the police spokesman said he had no immediate information.

Police had said earlier in the weekend that they were searching for a white man driving a white pickup, which was spotted in the area of three of the shootings early Friday. At least two dozen officers were called to investigate the case, along with the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service. The arrests came hours after authorities created Operation Random Shooter, a task force of various law enforcement agencies at various levels of government that have been working together on the case.

The shootings had placed Tulsa’s black community on edge over the weekend after the series of shootings early Friday morning. The shootings left many alarmed and worried in the north Tulsa area.

Authorities had said they thought the shootings by an attacker or attackers were linked because they happened around the same time within a three-mile span and all five victims were out walking when they were shot.

The Rev. Warren Blakney Sr., president of the Tulsa NAACP, had contacted police earlier to emphasize the need for all to work together to avoid vigilantism. Blakney also had spoken of “avid distrust” between the African-American community and the police department and he also raised concerns that the shootings be fully investigated.

Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan had said Saturday that police would do whatever it took to apprehend suspects in what he called vicious and cowardly attacks.

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TULSA, Okla.– Residents of Tulsa’s predominantly black north side said Saturday they’re afraid a shooter is still roaming their neighborhoods looking for victims after five people were shot – and three killed – a day earlier.

“We’re all nervous,” said Renaldo Works, 52, who was getting his hair cut at the crowded Charlie’s Angels Forever Hair Style Shop on Saturday morning. “I’ve got a 15-year-old, and I’m not going to let him out late. People are scared. We need facts.

“You don’t want to be a prisoner in your own home,” he said.

Police are still waiting for the results of forensic tests, but investigators think the shootings are linked because they happened around the same time within a 3-mile span, and all five victims were out walking when they were shot. All the victims are black, and community met this weekend in an effort to calm any unrest.

One of the victims told police that the shooter was a white man driving a white pickup truck who stopped to ask for directions before opening fire. Officer Jason Willingham said Saturday that the pickup was spotted in the area of three of the shootings.

“We don’t have one definitive way where this investigation is headed,” Willingham said. “Right now, that’s the only thing we have to go on.”

More than two dozen officers are investigating the case, along with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and other agencies, Willingham said.

As investigators searched for the killer, the tension and fear among some of the city’s black residents was palpable.

“It’s got everybody on edge,” said Louis Johnson, 24. “Everybody is saying the same thing – it’s a white guy in a white pickup or a Tahoe.”

Barber Charles Jones, 40, said the north side has had its share of crime trouble, but residents have never faced a series of random killings like these.

“It’s pretty shocking,” Jones said. “We’ve never had any serial-type stuff.”

At a neighborhood park a couple blocks from two of the shootings, parents kept close watch over their kids during an Easter egg hunt.

“The first I heard of it, it sounded like some type of gangland thing,” said 47-year-old parent Wayne Bell, who was hiding plastic eggs in the grass. “Everybody’s asking why. Everybody has to just stick together. It’s more of a keep close to the nest thing right now.”

The Rev. Warren Blakney Sr., president of the Tulsa NAACP, said “avid distrust” between the black community and the police department had raised concerns that the shootings wouldn’t be fully investigated, and he contacted police to emphasize the need for them to work together to avoid vigilantism.

“We have to handle this because there are a number of African-American males who are not going to allow this to happen in their neighborhood,” he said. “We’re trying to quell the feeling of `let’s get someone’ and we will make as certain as we can that this isn’t pushed under the rug.”

Tulsa’s police department has been tainted by accusations of corruption. Three ex-police officers and a former federal agent were sentenced to prison in December after a two-year investigation involving allegations of falsified search warrants, nonexistent informants, perjury and stolen drugs and money. Two other ex-officers were acquitted of stealing money during an FBI sting but fired after an internal affairs investigation.

More than a half-dozen lawsuits have been filed by people who claim they were wrongfully locked up by police, and nearly 40 people had their convictions overturned or prison sentences commuted as a result of the corruption probe. Prosecutors have suggested the five police officers who were charged were part of a broader plot in which corrupt officers stole money and drugs, conducted illegal searches and fabricated evidence without fear of getting caught.

Four of Friday’s shooting victims were found in yards, and the fifth in a street. Police identified those killed as Dannaer Fields, 49, Bobby Clark, 54, and William Allen, 31. Fields was found wounded about 1 a.m. Friday, Clark was found in a street about an hour later, and Allen was discovered in the yard of a funeral home about 8:30 a.m., though investigators believe he was shot much earlier.

Minutes after Fields was found, police found two men with gunshot wounds in another yard two blocks away. They were taken to hospitals in critical condition but were expected to survive, police said. Willingham said one of those men described the shooter as being white.

“The police chief has assured me they are doing all they can,” Blakney said. “We don’t want anybody else hurt, white or black.”

————————————————————————————————————————————–

A White gunman is on the run after gunning down three Black people in what is being investigated as a hate crime, reports CNN.

Three people were killed and two were injured Friday in four separate shootings in north Tulsa, Oklahoma and police are still searching for the suspect. We’re not absolutely certain, but a hate crime is a possibility, said Tulsa police spokesman Capt. Jonathan Brooks, “and we’ll go with where the investigation leads us. All of the victims are Black. The suspected shooter is a White male and is believed to be traveling in a white truck.”

The victims range in age from 31 to 54. According to Brooks, they were shot over a seven-hour period at four different street locations during the early morning hours.

According to CNN, Tulsa police has formed a joint task force with the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service to investigate the potential hate crime.

Prosecutors claim that Lydia Sanford, Erika Stroud and Felicia Stroud brutally beat an unidentified man after he bumped into one of them with his backpack.

The Boston Herald reports:

She said the victim, who suffered a broken nose, told cops he believed the attack was “motivated as a crime because of his sexual orientation” since the three women “called him insulting homophobic slurs.”

But attorney Helene Tomlinson, who represented Sanford, told the judge her client is “openly identified as a lesbian … so any homophobic (conduct) is unwarranted.” She said the alleged victim was the aggressor and used racial slurs: “He provoked them.”

Read More At The Boston Herald

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Williams, who is married to a white woman allegedly burned the cross in his driveway and left a note saying “better not leave that [N-word].”

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The News Herald reports:

Police thought so too. On Monday, LB Williams admitted to setting the fire and posting the notes, according to the arrest affidavit charging him with two felonies: domestic violence stalking and exhibits that intimidate. He did it, he said, so she wouldn’t proceed with the divorce she filed for.

It started clicking for Donna Williams a few minutes after she found the notes. The handwriting wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough that she recognized it. It wasn’t a hate crime, but a love crime. But for days, her husband denied involvement in both incidents.

Read More At The New Herald

The report, released by the FBI’s civil rights division, found the majority of hate crimes were motivated by anti-Black bias.

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Latinos were the targets of 66 percent of all hate crimes motivated by ethnicity or national origin. Jews were the targets of most crimes against religious groups, and most crimes against a particular sexual orientation or gender were motivated by “anti-homosexual male bias.”

The number of hate crimes remained essentially flat between 2009 and 2010. There were 6,628 hate crimes reported in 2010, up very slightly from 6,604 in 2009. About 47 percent of all the reported hate crimes were racially motivated, with 20 percent motivated by religion, 19.3 percent motivated by sexual orientation, and 12.8 percent motivated by nationality.

Read more at HuffingtonPost

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom said Tuesday the office will investigate the Oct. 7 attack on Sterling Law at his home in Council Grove. Law suffered second-degree burns to his stomach and upper legs.

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The Morris County prosecutor Laura Allen has charged 23-year-old Isaac Wilson with aggravated battery and aggravated burglary. She provided no information on whether the second suspect had been identified.

Law’s brother and a friend say he knew the attackers, but they don’t know if Law had been threatened in the past. The brother also says Law lives alone and has a diminished mental capacity.

Wayne Parson, who lives at the home with his wife, tells The News Journal  he is trying to figure out why someone would do such a thing. He says his family has lived in the neighborhood for decades with no trouble. For many years, they were the only black family in the neighborhood.

Police responded to a home in the Delaplane Court area Monday where the cross was found. Along with the racial slur, the message “Burn in hell” is also written. Police believe the cross was placed in the yard sometime overnight.

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JACKSON, Mississippi — The family of a black man who authorities say was run over by a white teenager in a truck is suing over the alleged hate crime.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in Mississippi accuses seven white teenagers of setting out on June 26 in search of a black man to harass.

A defendant in the lawsuit, Deryl Dedmon, is charged with capital murder and robbery in the death of 49-year-old James Craig Anderson.

Authorities say Dedmon intentionally ran over Anderson with a pickup truck in Jackson on June 26.

Dedmon was scheduled for a preliminary hearing Tuesday on the criminal charges.

Another defendant in the lawsuit, John Aaron Rice, is charged with assault.

Their attorneys say they were not involved in a racially-motivated attack.

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The Bend Bulletin reports:

Parvaiz, according to prosecutors, initially described a trio of attackers: one white, one black and one whose race he said he could not determine. He later changed his story, describing all three as black, before finally admitting to setting up the shooting, according to his arrest affidavit.

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Christopher Phillips, 19, says he was confronted by Thomas Randich, 19, at a late-night house party in suburban West Chicago, then attacked as he walked away from the argument.

“He was like, ‘Yeah, you’re talking to the wrong girl.’ I was like, I looked at him – I’m confused – I was like, ‘What do you mean I’m talking to the wrong girl?’” said Phillips in an interview with ABC.

VIDEO:

Phillips says he was punched from behind and hit the concrete floor with his face, then kicked and punched repeatedly.  Phillips’ injuries included a fractured jaw, four missing teeth, and cuts and bruises on his body.

Randich, 19, his brother Jake, 18, and Michael Mungovan, 19, have all been charged with aggravated battery.

“He was talking to a white girl, and they didn’t like it. And they jumped on him,” said Phillips’s father, LaMonte Phillips.

Read more at ABC.com

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One of the teens involved said “let’s go f**k with some n****,” before the incident began, according to police.

The group then proceeded to beat Anderson and run him over with a car. The driver, Deryl Dedmond, has been charged with murder and a hate crime . One of his friends was charged with assault and another two have not been charged yet.

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Dharun Ravi, 19, was indicted in Middlesex County on 15 counts including bias intimidation and invasion of privacy in events that predated the suicide of 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, who in death started a national conversation on the perils of bullying.

Ravi had already faced invasion of privacy charges along with another Rutgers student, Molly Wei. It took prosecutors months to present their case to a grand jury alleging that Ravi targeted Clementi because of his sexual orientation and tried to broadcast the encounter online to intimidate his roommate.

The cascade of events started the day Ravi “learned the name of his roommate,” Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said in a statement, not elaborating. The charges do not link the alleged spying to Clementi’s suicide.

“The grand jury indictment spells out cold and calculated acts against our son, Tyler, by his former college roommate,” Clementi’s parents, Jane and Joe Clementi, said in a statement. “If these facts are true, as they appear to be, then it is important for our criminal justice system to establish clear accountability under the law.”

The indictment is an important step in a heartbreaking case, state Attorney General Paula Dow said.

The state’s hate crime law “recognizes the terrible harm caused by acts of bigotry and hatred and imposes harsher punishment on those who commit such crimes,” Dow said.

If convicted of the most serious bias charge, Ravi could face five to 10 years in prison.

Kaplan said charges against Wei weren’t presented to the grand jury. It was unclear Wednesday whether a case against Wei would go before a grand jury or whether she helped prosecutors in the case against Ravi.

An attorney for Ravi did not return a call seeking comment, and Wei’s attorney declined to comment.

Prosecutors have said that Ravi used Wei’s computer in her dorm room to activate a webcam on a computer in his room to view and stream Clementi’s encounter. Prosecutors said Ravi tried the same thing during a second encounter Sept. 21, the day before Clementi’s suicide.

Ravi posted a message on his now-closed Twitter account on Sept. 19 that read: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Two days later, he wrote on Twitter: “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.”

Lawyers for Ravi and Wei later said that the webcam stream was viewed on only a single computer and did not show the men having sex.

The indictment said the sexual encounter was seen and accuses Ravi of targeting Clementi and invading his privacy, knowing that his roommate would be intimidated because of his sexual orientation.

The indictment also suggests that Ravi tried to cover up his actions, by deleting a Twitter post letting others know how they could view the second encounter, and replacing it with a false tweet. It said that Ravi also deleted text messages sent and received by witnesses and gave false information to police — all with the intent of misleading investigators.

A poster in a gay-themed chat room who appears to have been Clementi said he unplugged Ravi’s computer and searched for hidden cameras before the second liaison.

Clementi had apparently complained to the university about his roommate, and Rutgers officials have said they did all they could.

The young man left a note on his Facebook page on Sept. 22 that read: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

Clementi was a promising violinist — and out to his parents, an attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday — in his first weeks at college when he took his life.

His death came amid a string of high-profile suicides nationwide of young people who were gay or perceived to be gay.

Partly because of the way he killed himself — jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River — his suicide became the tipping point and led to a national conversation about bullying.

President Barack Obama, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and sex columnist Dan Savage talked publicly about his death, even videotaping statements, saying that young gays and lesbians need to know that life gets better after the torment of teen years.

New Jersey toughened its anti-bullying law in the months after Clementi’s suicide.

On Wednesday, gay rights activists cheered the indictment as an act of justice and a warning to would-be bullies.

“Without question, the indictment is in the best interests of justice and in the best interests of students across New Jersey, for their potential bullies will now think harder before demolishing another student’s life,” said Steven Goldstein of Garden State Equality.

Gov. Chris Christie in January signed a law requiring the codes of conduct at public colleges to address bullying.

Clementi’s parents have filed notice preserving their right to sue Rutgers, saying the university failed to put in place or enforce policies to deter such acts.

Their attorney, Paul Mainardi, said Wednesday that they are “in negotiations” with Rutgers.

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FARMINGTON, N.M. — Three friends had just finished their shifts at a McDonald’s when prosecutors say they carried out a gruesome attack on a customer: They allegedly shaped a coat hanger into a swastika, placed it on a heated stove and branded the symbol on the arm of the mentally disabled Navajo man.

Authorities say they then shaved a swastika on the back of the 22-year-old victim’s head and used markers to scrawl messages and images on his body, including “KKK,” “White Power,” a pentagram and a graphic image of a penis.

The men have become the first in the nation to be charged under a new law that makes it easier for the federal government to prosecute people for hate crimes.

The case also marked the latest troubling race-related attack in this New Mexico community, prompting a renewed focus among local leaders on improving relations between Navajos and whites.

The defendants are accused of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and could face 10 years in prison if convicted. The sentences could be extended to life if the government proves kidnapping occurred.

Federal prosecutors say they were able to bring the case because the 2009 law eliminated a requirement that a victim must be engaged in a federally protected activity, such as voting or attending school, for hate crime charges to be leveled.

The law also expanded civil rights protections to include violence that is based on gender, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.

The swastika branding has also put the spotlight back on Farmington, a predominantly white community of about 45,000 residents near the Navajo Nation.

Farmington leaders signed a historic agreement earlier this month with the Navajo Nation in which both sides pledged to work toward improving race relations.

The signing ceremony was held at City Hall and included a blessing by a Navajo medicine man who prayed for a strong, stable and long-running agreement. City officials sat cross-legged on the floor alongside Navajos during the service.

“Mistreatment of fellow humans is a learned behavior. The only thing that will address that directly is education,” said Duane “Chili” Yazzie, chairman of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission and a participant in the signing ceremony.

The signing was significant because it put into writing what both sides have long expressed. Negotiations took almost a year as the parties discussed wording and language.

Navajo and city leaders agree race relations have improved dramatically since May 1974, when the beaten and burned bodies of three Navajo men were found north of town. Three white high school students were linked to the crime and sent to reform school, outraging the Navajo community.

More recently there were other events.

There was the 2006 kidnapping and beating of a Navajo man by three young white men. Six days later, a Navajo man was shot to death in a Walmart parking lot by a Farmington police officer responding to a domestic violence call.

The shooting was ruled justified by sheriff’s investigators and the Justice Department determined there was no basis for a civil rights investigation. Still, the incident touched off a round of protests by angry Navajos.

When a New Mexico advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited Farmington in 2004 to assess the city’s progress 30 years after the canyon murders, several speakers at a forum complained that harassment of Indians by white youth continues.

In the current case, defendants William Hatch of Fruitland and Paul Beebe and Jesse Sanford, both of Farmington, have pleaded not guilty. Their court-appointed lawyers have declined comment. They have also been charged with state crimes.

Yazzie and Mayor Tommy Roberts said despite the history of problems, there is evidence of substantial progress in Farmington, including the recent agreement between city and tribal leaders.

The consensus after the ceremony was that people who discriminate in Farmington – both Anglo and Navajo – are in the minority.

“There are thousands of interactions every day between people of different cultures in Farmington,” Roberts said. “Most of those occur without any problems.”

Roberts said the city has made decisive efforts to address and improve race relations in Farmington, a center for oil and natural gas production and commerce that draws shoppers from southwestern Colorado and across the Navajo lands of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

In recent years, Farmington has hired more Navajo police officers, opened an Indian center to showcase cultural heritage, supported an alcohol treatment center and established a community relations commission that looks into Navajo complaints.

But Roberts said it’s not realistic to expect the community to fully eliminate bias and prejudice, and he said it’s unfortunate that periodic racial incidents are likely.

“There will always be people who just don’t get it,” Roberts said. “They’re not going to change their attitudes and at some point they’ll carry out their beliefs in a way we all find real troubling. But what we do have now is a greater understanding of culture in our community, and I think that understanding runs both ways.”

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Tensions are arising in Miami after an African American male, Akil Larue Oliver was killed by Arab store owners in Miami. CBS 4 Miami reports: Demonstrators

A demonstration was held outside the store Friday night, and those attending said Akil Larue Oliver, 34, was beaten to death because he was black.

But Miami-Dade Police spokesman Roy Rutland said it was Oliver who went into the store at 5:45 p.m. Thursday and allegedly began verbally attacking the store owners, using racial slurs against them.

As he was being escorted out of the store by the corrections officer, Nabil Sulaiman, 19, allegedly armed himself with a bottle and hit him.

Police reports say three other employees became involved and as Oliver began to defend himself Ragheb M. Sulaiman, 24, allegedly hit him over the head with a crowbar, killing him.

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WASHINGTON – The number of hate crime incidents and victims declined in 2009 compared with the previous year, the FBI reported Monday.

Of more than 6,000 hate crime offenders, over six in 10 were white while nearly two in 10 were black.

Nearly half of the crime incidents in 2009 were motivated by racial bias, nearly 20 percent by religious bias and over 18 percent by sexual orientation bias.

More than half the reported hate crimes against individual people were assaults, said the FBI. One out of a hundred hate crimes involved murder or rape.

There were 6,604 hate crime incidents reported last year, down from 7,783 in 2008. There were 8,336 reported victims, down from 9,691 in 2008. The victim totals include not only individuals but also businesses, religious buildings and other institutions.

The year-to-year figures in the FBI reports for 2009 and 2008 are not exactly comparable because the number of law enforcement agencies providing data to the bureau on hate crime went up last year to more than 14,000, compared to 13,690 in 2008. Nearly 4,000 police jurisdictions do not participate in the program, said the group Human Rights First.

The Anti-Defamation League welcomed a substantial drop in the number of hate crimes in the latest report but expressed disappointment that more than 60 cities with over 100,000 populations each did not participate in the study.

On balance, “we welcome the fact that the FBI’s report contains both the lowest hate crime totals since 1994 and the largest number of reporting law enforcement agencies ever,” ADL national chair Robert Sugarman and ADL national director Abraham Foxman said.

The report said that out of some 4,000 victims of racial bias, seven in 10 were victims because of prejudice against blacks.

Out of nearly 1,600 victims of anti-religious bias, about the same proportion — seven of 10 — stemmed from anti-Jewish bias.

In a separate study, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that homosexuals are far more likely to be victims of violent hate crime than any other minority group.

Timing the release of its study to coincide with the latest FBI report on hate crimes, the nonprofit center said it based its conclusion on 14 years of FBI hate crime data covering 1995-2008. The center said that homosexuals, or those perceived to be gay, are more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or blacks; more than four times as likely as Muslims; and 14 times as likely as Latinos.

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Laurel police were trying Monday to determine who hung a doll from a noose in front of an African American church on Laurel Park Drive late Saturday or early Sunday, authorities said.

A maintenance man found the doll, which was hanging from a tree in front of the City of Zion Church, about 7:30 a.m. Sunday, said Gregory Strong, the pastor. Someone had written racial slurs on the doll, along with references to President Obama, he said.

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The Seattle Post Intelligencier is reporting that an Asian man and a Black man were charged with a hate crime for beating a white teen.

Two men accused of beating a teenager and blaming it on white oppression were charged Tuesday with a hate crime and first-degree robbery.

Prosecutors allege Ahmed Mohamed, who is black, and Jonathan Baquiring, who is Asian, had blood on them when an officer stopped them shortly after the May 25 attack.

“During this time they beat him with their hands and feet, whipped him with his own belt, burned him with a lit cigarette, poured energy beer on him and urinated on him,” Moore wrote.

“Mr. Shane McClellan said during the assault both suspects made comments like, ‘the white man has kept us down’ and ‘this is for enslaving our people,’” Moore wrote.

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A white supremacist who goes by the nickname “Hitler” used his sentencing hearing on Monday to apologize to an elderly black man he beat a year ago, saying he is “haunted” by his actions.

Calvin E. Lockner, 29, was sentenced to 31 years in prison for the racially motivated attack last August on James Privott and related crimes. The 77-year-old victim, who is black, was fishing with his wife in a south Baltimore park when Lockner and two teenagers kicked him and beat him with a baseball bat, then stole his car, according to prosecutors.

Lockner told police the beating wouldn’t have happened if the victim had been white. He belongs to white supremacist groups and has a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on his midsection, and police said he used the Nazi leader’s name as a nickname.

Lockner did not speak at the sentencing, but his public defender, Audre Davis, read a statement written by her client. He said in the statement that he regrets the beating and thinks about how he would have felt if something similar had happened to his late grandfather.

“I live in a haunted state of mind,” Lockner said, adding that his goal was to repair his “shattered life” and “become a better, peaceful, more God-fearing man.”

Lockner offered a formal apology to Privott and said he hoped the victim and his family could move on with their lives.

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“I should have been able to conduct myself as a man, but chose the actions of a boy,” he said.

Privott, who spoke briefly, did not describe the beating or its racial undertones but said the aftermath was rough on him and his family. He lost two teeth and suffered a broken eye socket.

“For about three weeks, I couldn’t see,” he said. “I wanted to let you know that this situation was extremely stressful.”

Privott declined to speak to reporters after the hearing.

Lockner pleaded guilty last week to armed carjacking, first-degree assault and harassment based on race or religion. He received a 30-year sentence for those crimes and was given a 1-year consecutive sentence for throwing urine in the face of a corrections officer earlier this year. The officer declined to speak in court.

Lockner’s co-defendant, 18-year-old Zachary Watson, is awaiting trial on similar charges. A second teenager had his case moved to juvenile court.

Lockner has spent most of his adult life in prison. He was charged in 2000 with raping a 38-year-old woman and a 4-year-old girl, and received an 8-year sentence after a plea deal.

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The two-count indictment against Ronald Pudder, 23, of Conneaut in northeast Ohio, was detailed at a news conference Friday with the nation’s top civil rights attorney, Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

He said the government was determined to deter a rash of copycat crimes.

“Hate crimes reflect a cancer of the soul,” Perez said.

“They are designed not only to injure the particular victim or victims, but to send a message to the community: a message of fear, an effort to divide communities along racial or religious lines.”

U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said Pudder was charged with felony counts of damaging a church based on bias and arson.

Pudder is accused in a midweek fire that damaged the entrance to the First Azusa Apostolic Faith Church of God in Conneaut before dawn on May 20. No one was hurt.

The government said it’s the only black church in Conneaut, a community of about 12,000 with a 1 percent black population and located between Cleveland and Erie, Pa.

No attorney is listed for Pudder in court records. He was arrested at the fire scene by police who said they noticed a suspicious car driving by slowly.

The head of FBI in Cleveland, Frank Figliuzzi, alluded to the uproar over a proposed mosque near ground zero in New York and a threat by a Florida pastor to burn the Quran in highlighting the agency’s fight against hate crimes.

“At a time when the nation is debating the location of a place of worship and people are talking about burning sacred books, we must all understand that when rhetoric turns to hate and hate turns to violence we are all harmed,” Figliuzzi said.

Church leaders could not be reached for comment. Calls to the church went unanswered.

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When Rodolfo Olmedo was dragged down by a group of men shouting anti-Mexican epithets and bashed over the head with a wooden stick on the street outside his home, he instinctively covered his face to keep from getting disfigured. Blood filled his mouth.

“I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t because of the beating they were giving me,” said the 25-year-old baker. Nearly five months later, he is still taking pain medications for his head injuries.

Recorded by a store’s surveillance camera, the assault was the first of 11 suspected anti-Hispanic bias attacks in a Staten Island neighborhood, re-igniting years-old tensions between blacks and Hispanics in New York City’s most remote borough.

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Residents of Port Richmond — where an influx of newcomers from Latin America over the past decade has transformed the community — alternately blame the attacks on the economy, unemployment and the debate over Arizona’s immigration law.

And although most of the suspects were described as young black men and investigated for bias crimes, a grand jury has indicted only one of seven people arrested on a hate-crime charge.

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A suspect in a string of 18 stabbings that terrorized people across three states and left five dead was arrested in front of startled passengers at an airport gate as he tried to board a plane for Israel, officials said Thursday.

A judge in Flint, Mich., where the attacks began in late May, signed a warrant Thursday charging Elias Abuelazam, 33, with assault with intent to murder in connection with a July 27 stabbing.

Antwoine Marshall, 26, of Flint, the victim of that attack, told The Associated Press that the FBI visited him at 3 a.m. to show him a picture of the man arrested in Atlanta, and he identified him as the assailant.

Marshall said he was going into his apartment building when the assailant approached and asked for help fixing his car. He was stabbed twice when he opened the hood. Three of his organs were cut, and he has a long scar from his chest to his pelvic area.

Marshall said he wants to “retaliate” but “I’ll let God handle it. Every time I look at my scar, I get angry.”

In Michigan, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said authorities still don’t know the motive. Most victims were black, and police have said the attacks may have been racially motivated, though Leyton said there was no evidence of that.

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Atlanta police said they went to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at the request of Michigan State Police and paged Abuelazam over the intercom as he waited to board a Delta Air Lines flight to Tel Aviv.

Passengers on that flight said as they arrived in Tel Aviv that he was tense and talking on his cell phone when he was arrested at the boarding gate shortly before takeoff. They said six police officers led him away without incident.

“He was talking on the phone. I didn’t hear what he said,” Romi Shaked, who was on the plane, told The Associated Press. “I just saw him talking to different people and moving around and sitting in different seats.”

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Leyton said Abuelazam’s uncle bought him the plane ticket, which cost about $3,000, and is now cooperating with police.

The suspect has ties to Flint and to Leesburg, Va., the site of three similar attacks last week, Leesburg Police Officer Chris Jones said.

“While this is a key step in the investigation, there are still many issues that need to be addressed before we identify this individual as the person responsible for this horrific crime spree,” Jones said.

Police in Arlington, Va., said Abuelazam was arrested there during a routine traffic stop last week.

Arlington Detective Crystal L. Nosal said police realized he was wanted on a simple assault warrant in Leesburg, about 30 miles away, but a magistrate released him on personal recognizance, meaning he was responsible for returning to court.

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Leyton, the Michigan prosecutor, said the Arlington stop was for failure to obey a highway sign and police found a knife in the driver’s side door and a hammer on the floor of Abuelazam’s 1996 green and gold Chevrolet Blazer. A hammer was used in one attack in Virginia, on a 19-year-old man in a parking lot.

Police impounded the Blazer, which matched a vehicle described by some stabbing victims who survived, then gave it back to Abuelazam, Leyton said.

According to court records in Loudoun County, where Leesburg is located, Abuelazam was arrested in December 2007 and charged with felony gun possession. Those charges were dropped the next year.

He was also charged with misdemeanor assault in 2008, and had a court date scheduled next week.

Abuelazam is an Israeli citizen who is living in the U.S. with a green card, Leyton said.

Police had focused their hunt on Flint — where 16 stabbings took place — until Leesburg police reported three attacks. Authorities in Toledo, Ohio, say a stabbing in that city Saturday appears to be linked to the violent spree.

In Mount Morris Township, near Flint, a few dozen people who heard about the arrest gathered outside a convenience store where Abuelazam worked. One yelled that the owner should have been suspicious. Police cleared the parking lot.

“He was a good guy. All of my employees, we never thought nothing about the guy,” said Abdulla Farrah, manager of Kingwater Market.

Farrah said Abuelazam worked there for about a month before leaving Aug. 1. He said investigators looked at store video Wednesday.

Jessica Abuelazam, an Arlington, Texas, woman who identified herself as Elias’ ex-wife, said she was struggling to cope with the news too.

“I’m shocked,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, a task force led by the Michigan State Police and including the FBI had received 469 tips.

The attacks began in late spring and police said they usually followed a pattern: The suspect approached black men late at night on lonely urban roads and asked for directions or help with a broken-down car. Then, without warning, he pulled out a knife and struck. Then, he sped away, leaving them for dead.

The brazen nature and the frequency of the attacks — the assailant struck an average of about once every four days since the first stabbing in May — has terrified some of those in cities he’s already targeted.

The youngest victim was 17; the oldest was 60. They ranged in size from 5-foot-4 inches and 120 pounds to 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds.

A suspect believed to be the racist serial stabber has been arrested by authorities trying to flee the country in Atlanta. The man, who is white, attacked 20 men in a three state stabbing spree. Five died from their injuries and 15 were wounded.

Police narrowed in on the suspect after catching him on security cameras in a dark green Chevy Blazer leaving the scene of his last crime.  The attacks occurred in Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio. The suspect has been handed over to the FBI and local Atlanta authorities.

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