Michael Jacques was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the November, 2008, the night of Obama’s election, burning of a predominately black Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, MA. The church was being rebuilt and was 75% complete at the time of the fire. Jacques and his accomplices were ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution to the Church and its insurance company.
According to the Huffington Post:
[Accomplice] Haskell told police that Jacques "was angry that the country was going to have an African American president and that the blacks and Puerto Ricans would now have more rights than whites," according to court documents.
Two accomplices, Benjamin F. Haskell and Thomas A. Gleason, pled guilty previously, but Jacques maintained his innocence, alleging that his confession was coerced and that the two accomplices were lying. Gleason testified against Jacques at trial in March, telling jurors Gleason outlined the words “hate nigger” in accelerant on the edge of the burn site.
The three were caught as part of a government sting operation; an undercover agent posed as someone looking for an arsonist to burn a business. The jury convicted Jacques after an 11-day trial last April.
Michael Jacques’ trial begins: wwlp.com
Jacques maintained his innocence and that his confession after a 6-hour interrogation came from his withdrawal from the narcotic painkiller Percocet that Jacques had been abusing daily for years.
The obvious question is whether the arsonists were birthers. U. S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor judge said:
“That something like this should happen in our community is appalling … but it had another side to it. This was a group of shiftless, pathetic young men … It was vicious, but purely blind stupidity almost beyond comprehension,” the judge said.
That sounds like fertile ground for birther beliefs, but hardly conclusive.
Read more:
- Boston Herald
- Mass Live (archive)
- WWLP News
Does not sound birther IMO, they were angry about the election. His two accomplices spilled the beans on him when caught.
If they did not burn down the church for racial reasons like he says…they still burned down the church and it is still a crime (Arson)
I doubt that these men were birthers. They were probably ñames and as a good friend of mine once said, I doubt that any of these men had and IQ above room temperature.
If you into digging up senseless acts of racist violence (which will bring teas to your eyes and hurt your heart) you might consider running a story about the 2008 murders of Marine SGT Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak in Riverside county California.
Both were in their mid twenties. Sergeant Pietrzak was white (Polish) and his wife Quiana was black. They were a very nice looking young couple.
Four of Sergeant Pietzak’s fellow US Marines, all of them black, decided to murder both of the him and his wife Quiana because they didn’t like the fact that the fact that one of their black sisters, Quiana, (not related by any means unless your super religious and want to make the Adam and Eve claim that we are all related), was genuinely in love with (and sprung on his magic stick) a white man.
The names and ranks of the four black Marines are: Lance Cpl. Emrys, Cpl. Kesuan Sykes, Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox, and Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller.
Before the murders they even did a rap song and posted it on myspace, “”Chillin waitin 4 da killin”.
On the night of October 15, 2008 the black Marines forced their way into the the home of Jan and Quiana and raped, sever times raped, Quiana, beat Jan and then shot them both dead in execution style.
The mainstream media, and the Riverside county and Los Angeles county police, decided that it was politically correct to report that these crimes were not racially motivated. I’m not going to get into a long and hairy discussion about that but I will say one thing, if you believe that then you are probably a dumb white person that feels bad about slavery days.
Here is one related youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II8oOaVlo8g
They were upset that a black man won the election.
Sounds pretty much exactly like the core concept that spawned the birther movement. There really wasn’t much of a birther movement before the election, so I’ve no doubt that if these cretin’s hadn’t burned the church, they’d have been faithful and fervent birthers once it got moving.
Makes, me wonder if the upset and apparently racist former gun store employee I mentioned in a past comment went on to become a birther.
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2009/11/the-president-is-a-ni/#comment-27474
Haters are such homers! Always happy to hate their neighbors. My first reaction to the article was: “Puerto Ricans? What did the poor Puerto Ricans do?” Guilty of being non-white in New England. Here it would have been Mexicans, in FL Cubans, CA Vietnamese. Hate is never impulsive or random. Mundane, ho-hum.
I have posted this before, and it is worth repeating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Chin
Vincent Jen Chin (May 18, 1955 – June 23, 1982) was a Chinese American beaten to death in June 1982 in the United States, in the Detroit, Michigan enclave of Highland Park by Chrysler plant superintendent Ronald Ebens, with the help of his stepson, Michael Nitz.
Many of the layoffs in Detroit’s auto industry, including Nitz’s in 1979, had been due to the increasing market share of Japanese automakers…
Ebens instigated the incident by declaring, “It’s because of you little motherf******* that we’re out of work!” referring to U.S. auto manufacturing jobs being lost to Japan, despite the fact that Chin was not Japanese. Ebens and Nitz searched the neighborhood for 20 to 30 minutes and even paid another man 20 dollars to help look for Chin, before finding him at a McDonald’s restaurant. Chin tried to escape, but was held by Nitz while Ebens repeatedly bludgeoned Chin with a baseball bat. Chin was struck at least four times with the bat, including blows to the head. As Chin slipped into a coma, he whispered to his friend, “It’s not fair.” When rushed to Henry Ford Hospital, he was unconscious and died after four days in a coma, on June 23, 1982.
Ronald Ebens was arrested and taken into custody at the scene of the murder by two off-duty police officers who had witnessed the beating. Ebens and Nitz were convicted in a county court for manslaughter by Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman, after a plea bargain brought the charges down from second-degree murder. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. In a response letter to protests from American Citizens for Justice, Kaufman said, “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail… You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
Vincent Who? -Official Full-Length Trailer- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_rwnyM1vtE
i have to challenge this as both race baiting (inciting racism) and trolling the web.
you are trying to connect republicans and the obama victory to lunatic arsonists.
are democrat family values represented by anthony weiner ?
the picture is infammatory. how many black churches were torched during clinton and bush. i think it’s pretty aweful, looking at the google search results.
“Aweful”, indicating you are in awe of the act? What a disgusting sentiment.
As a Conservative and a Republican, I call troll on this one.
Sorry Bernadine, but the “I know you are but what am I” defense is infantile.
Also your accusation of trolling is overloading my Irony Meter.
How many of the Twitter posts at the link below are racially motivated?
See http://viletweets.com/
Read a few pages and let me know. Thanks, princess.
full of awe… but yes
what group are you trying to generalize about sally ?
You enjoyed those Twitter posts, didn’t you?
You laughed, right? How many of the angry, violent posts had you yelling, “YES!”?
Come on, missy bernadine. Confess.
Aren’t you thinking up a few tweets like that of your own right now?
i don’t see how they apply.. did you “enjoy” them ??
You didn’t answer my questions.
You enjoyed those Twitter posts, didn’t you?
You laughed, right? How many of the angry, violent posts had you yelling, “YES!”?
Concern trolls never do
Sorry, but you are the only one here casting a broader defensive net than warranted and going off on utterly unrelated tangents, which don’t merit any relevant response.
This article deals with pointing out an explicit situation of a bad incident with proven correlation between the perpetrators and their motivation being a reaction to Obama’s election:
The charges of racism being made are being applied to them directly and appropriately so. This is simply a clear cut cause/effect relationship here in terms of the motivations of this particular group of individuals.
You are being hyperbolic in your weird defensive over-reaction and trying to defend some broader set of groups that have not been accused in this article at all.
Not Dr. C or anyone else said anything about the Republican Party, etc…so I don’t know where you come up with any connection between this incident by a few racist individuals to the GOP? Nothing of the sort has been said or implied here. None. Nada. Nothing whatsoever.
…Except in the knee-jerk reflexive defensiveness within your own head… So sorry Scott, your bizarre reaction here is making connections that only YOU are making.
So I have to ask, why are YOU so defensive on this? Why do YOU make such connections to racism and the GOP? If you didn’t have some inner emotional connection between the two, then you would not have brought the issue up all on your own.
Why does the mere mention of a directly racist event by a small group of racist individuals seem to evoke a personal feeling of defensive guilt by you???
Your irrationally defensive and unprovoked reaction on the topic merely only reveals more about you and your hang-ups and has nothing to do with the article or situation at all. Only guilty people tend to react so defensively…so what are you trying to tell us about yourself here, Scott?