Yet Another Family Duo Get Arrested for a Hate Crime.

     There's one thing the past few years have taught us: hate runs in the family. The men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery were a father and son named Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William Roddie Bryan, Jr.; all were convicted of a hate crime in federal court after being sentenced to life in prison on murder charges in state court. The text messages exchanged between the men and their family and friends were horrific, ranging from using the n-word to referring to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade as the "Monkey Day Parade," to sharing a video of a black boy dancing with a white supremacist song playing over it, to saying they did not like working with black people, to calling for violence against black people, to saying black people were "savages" who "ruin everything," to saying they were glad they weren't black, to saying Irish slaves were treated worse than anyone in America but "weren't asking for handouts," to saying "we used to walk around committing hate crimes all day," to laughing at a blackface Halloween costume mocking Trayvon Martin, to calling black civil rights activist Julian Bond "nothing but trouble" and saying he "should've been put in the ground years ago." That's on top of the fact that Roddie Bryan was an admitted pedophile.

     Then there was the case of D'Monterrio Gibson, a black FedEx driver who was shot at by a white father and son named Gregory and Brandon Case in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in February 2022. Both have been charged with at least one of the felony crimes of conspiracy, felonious assault, and illegal use of a weapon. While their cases haven't made much progress in the courts, it is at least encouraging to know that Gibson was given his job back as well as the pay that was initially withheld by the shipping company after the incident.

     Now, just this month, there is another case to follow, that of brothers Roy and Robert Lashley. While exiting a convenience store in Citrus County, Florida, just north of Tampa, on November 17th, 2021, a black man was approached by Roy, 55, and Robert, 52. They began calling him racial slurs, Roy beating him with an axe handle and Robert using his fists. They were charged with battery at the state level, and Roy had an additional charge of resisting an officer added after he got into an altercation with an officer. After Robert's arrest, the duo was indicted on a federal hate crime charge that could see each of them face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison with three years of supervised release and $250,000 fines. It took the federal government stepping in, but justice has finally been served with the arrests, and we have to keep fighting for accountability with convictions.