Topic: WorldNetDaily
Colin Flaherty cranked up the race-baiting drama in describing one so-called "Knockout Game" incident in a Dec. 30 WorldNetDaily article:
The most recent example of the Knockout Game involves a couple taking a late-night stroll at the open-air mall in Charlottesville, Va., when they were viciously beaten.
Jeanne Doucette and her boyfriend, Marc Adams, were enjoying the Christmas lights downtown when Adams tripped and was immediately pounced upon by three black men.
They beat him severely, breaking his ankle, cracking ribs and knocking out one of his teeth, reports the Charlottesville Weekly.
While Doucette suffered bruising to her head and tearing of the cartilage in her ear, Adams bore the brunt of the men’s aggression, sustaining broken bones and a concussion that he said has robbed him of any memory of the incident and its immediate aftermath.
According to the victims, the attackers never uttered any racial epithets and, therefore, police are not classifying it as a “hate crime.”The assault moved up the street as Adams and Doucette tried to escape their attackers. They screamed at passersby for help. They screamed at their attackers to stop. No one listened. The beating continued.
Then came the laughter, one of the identifying aspects of the Knockout Game.
“They were laughing, high-fiving, hugging, and then returning to kick him,” said Doucette. “There was some kind of camaraderie to it.”
Doucette managed to take photos that appear to show the assailants as they kicked and pummeled her boyfriend into unconsciousness.
Nearly two weeks after the attack, the physical wounds are healing, but both Doucette and Adams are troubled by what they see as a lack of response from the Charlottesville Police Department. Doucette said police refused to release her photos to the public.
“I don’t understand why they couldn’t even have the courtesy to call and say we’re not even going to look for them,” she told the newspaper.
On Dec. 29, Doucette posted the pictures she’d taken to her Facebook page and said she quickly received several tips she has passed on to police.
Her frustration at the lack of an investigation is palpable.
“I feel forgotten about,” Doucette said. “I feel like I’m not safe.”
WND liked Flaherty's race-baiting prose so much that Drew Zahn copied it nearly word-for-word in another article published the same day.Flaherty also posted the incident on his personal blog.
Just one little problem: That is apparently not what happened at all.
A Charlottesville blogger dug into the inicident and found things to be quite different than what Flaherty described:
As previously reported by the DTM, two separate sources, who wished to remain anonymous, but who were questioned by detectives in the investigation, said that Doucette told people that Adams had “said something that provoked the men.” Longo did not offer any specifics on what might have been said, saying it was “not really clear what the exchange had been.” As previously reported, sources the DTM spoke to said the attackers were known to be gay, and that they may have been angered by specific comments uttered by Adams and/or Doucette. Indeed, [suspect James] Stevenson, who delivered the majority blows to Adams, has a profile on a social media website called spring.me, under the handle “luverangel,” on which he reveals that he knew he was gay when he was 12-years old. Stevenson also appears in a video of the former Hook Newspaper’s “Question of the Week” feature, answering a question in May, 2011 about what he was going to do for the summer.
While Longo has admitted that a communication “breakdown” caused the case not to be assigned to investigators as soon as it could have, during and interview with the DTM, he bristled at the suggestion that his police force had acted negligently, or that they weren’t concerned about solving the case. As detailed previously in the DTM, the behavior of the victims had as much to do with the progress of the case as the internal communication breakdown. As Longo reiterated at the press conference, Adams refused to file a report with an officer at the scene, refused even to provide his name or have his injuries photographed, and refused medical attention, as did Doucette. It wasn’t until 24 hours later that Adams, after posting on Facebook about the incident, decided to call police. And, of course, as stories in the DTM suggest, and the police investigation seems to confirm, both Adams and Doucette may have been less than forthcoming about the circumstances surrounding the incident when they first posted on Facebook and spoke to the press, choosing instead to characterize the incident in a way that avoided revealing their involvement in the confrontation.
The blog's author told Gawker that "At this point, I have a number of good sources telling me that Stevenson and Spears are gay, and that they believe that they were reacting to racist and/or homophobic comments made by the victims, and my gut tells me that is true." He added that the men "were originally portrayed and perceived as gangsta thugs," and their gayness is "something I imagine will screw with the minds of all the people who went ahead and assumed that."
Like the rest of WND, Flaherty is not big on issuing corrections -- even when he's included non-blacks (and non-humans) in his scary "black mobs." So look for this to go straight down the memory hole.
