On July 9th, Jill LeCroix was taking an MTA bus in Queens to run some errands. The 57-year-old is a grandmother of five and, because it’s central to the story, we will point out that she is white. While on the bus, LeCroix was approached by three teenage girls. For the same reason, we will mention that the girls were Black. Completely unprovoked, the girls began striking Jill LeCroix in the head with one or more unspecified blunt objects. Before and during the attack, the girls accused LeCroix of being a Trump supporter and said that they “hated white people, the way they talk.” They said she was going to “get what you deserve. All white people will.” She was knocked to the floor and left with injuries requiring stitches in her head. Two of the girls, ages 15 and 16, were arrested a few weeks later. The final suspect, 19-year-old Jahnaiya Williams of Queens was arrested this week.

Normally, a mugging or beating in New York City wouldn’t be worth a mention in the news. There are too many of them every week to have room for all of them in the papers. But this one has a twist to it. All three of the girls are being charged with a hate crime in addition to assault charges and the case is being handled by the NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force. (NY Post)

A third suspect was arrested in an alleged “anti-white” crime that left a 57-year-old grandmother bloodied with a head injury after she was attacked on a Queens bus last month, police said.

With two teenage girls already nabbed, Jahnaiya Williams, 19, of Queens, was taken into custody Monday morning, the NYPD said. She is charged with assault and aggravated harassment. Both are classified as hate crimes, authorities said.

Three assailants approached victim Jill LeCroix, a grandmother of five, and struck her in the head with an unknown object while making anti-white statements in the July 9 attack, police have said. The victim required three staples on her head, police said.

This is something that almost never happens anywhere in the United States. Normally, if someone asks why crimes committed against white people by minority suspects aren’t prosecuted as hate crimes they are informed that they are racist and told to shut up and sit down. So when it actually does happen, we should feel obligated to point it out.

Perhaps this is what it took. We apparently needed a set of attackers who were so blatantly and explicitly racist in their speech, essentially confessing that the attack was taking place for no reason other than the color of the victim’s skin before the authorities would take action. It didn’t hurt that there were plenty of witnesses on the bus and LeCroix was the only white passenger at the time.

I have never been a fan of hate crime laws, as most regular readers are likely aware. They represent thought crimes. And speech, no matter how hateful, remains protected in the United States, or at least it was supposed to be. The fact that these teens attacked an elderly woman and sent her to the hospital for stitches should have been more than enough reason to process them through the criminal justice system.

But if we have to have hate crime laws and they are not going to be struck down in the courts (which seems to be the case), then they need to be applied equally to all guilty parties, just like any other law. And if that means they are going to be applied to people of all races, so be it. Now, if the statute of limitations hasn’t run out yet, perhaps the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force would care to look through some of the older online videos from the BLM riots in the summer of 2020. I’m confident they could find many more examples and suspects that they might want to have a chat with.