Majorityrights News > Category: Anti-racism

News Sentinel, “Horror of Christian/Newsom killings in focus: What happened on Chipman Street”

In one of Knoxville’s most horrific crimes, Channon Christian, 21, and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and slain in January 2007. Five suspects were identified. One was tried federally as an accessory. Four others were tried in Knox County Criminal Court.

A drug scandal involving the judge in those state court proceedings would upend the convictions against two of those suspects. New trials were held, the most recent of which occurred last week.

Through it all, details of the horrors this young couple suffered have eked out. But with each suspect pointing the finger of blame at the other and jurors limited by law in what they are allowed to know, the real story of what happened when the couple were taken hostage and ultimately slain has proved just as elusive as the court cases convoluted.

Setting the stage

The News Sentinel has covered this case since its beginning. With the aid of interviews, trial coverage and transcripts of each defendant’s statement to authorities, the newspaper can now offer up a snapshot of not only what happened to these two innocents but exactly who did what to them.

Chipman Street resident Lemaricus Davidson was broke and angry. His girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, had left him. He had no car and no way to earn money.

“Selling dope, that’s what I do,” Davidson would later tell law enforcement.

Law enforcers knew, however, that Davidson was not simply a drug dealer. He was on parole for carjacking and, in the days leading up to the abduction of Christian and Newsom, was suspected in a series of robberies.

In the days before the couple’s abduction, Davidson’s brother Letalvis Cobbins came to Knoxville from Kentucky to stay with him. He brought along friend George Thomas and girlfriend Vanessa Coleman.

None of the three had jobs, money or vehicles. Cobbins and Thomas were homeless. Coleman had a salt-of-the-earth family to turn to for help but chose not to.

Davidson grew increasingly angry over what he viewed as the freeloading of his brother and his guests. He turned that anger on Sutton. She left him on Jan. 5, 2007.

A day later, Davidson had concocted a plan to solve all his woes. He, with help from Cobbins and a buddy, Eric Boyd, would carjack someone. Cobbins insisted that he wasn’t happy with the idea.

“Me and my brother got to arguing because he said he was going to do some crazy (expletive),” Cobbins said in an interview with law enforcement. “He like, man, I’m fixing to go carjack somebody, man, try and get me some money.”

        Savaging the victims

       

Christian and Newsom disappeared Jan. 6, 2007, from the Washington Ridge apartments where Christian’s best friend lived.

Hours later, Newsom’s body was found alongside railroad tracks near Chipman Street in East Knoxville. He had been raped with an object and then shot three times. The final shot was delivered execution style. He had been gagged with a sock stuffed in his mouth. His ankles were bound with his own belt. His hands were secured behind his back. His face was wrapped in a bandanna. His head was covered with a sweatshirt tied around his neck with shoestrings.Forensic evidence showed that he had been raped in the final hours of his life. He was forced to walk barefoot to the railroad tracks that ran parallel to Chipman Street and shot in the neck and back. As Newsom lay paralyzed on the ground, the muzzle of a .22-caliber gun was placed against his covered head and fired. His body would later be wrapped up in a comforter, doused in gasoline and set afire.

Christian, meanwhile, was tied up inside the Chipman Street house of Davidson, a stranger to her. She was repeatedly raped orally, vaginally and rectally. At some point, she was savagely attacked in her genital region, either kicked or beaten with an object. She suffered two blows to the head and was dragged into the carpeted living room of Davidson’s Chipman Street home. Bleach was sprayed down her throat, an apparent effort to destroy DNA evidence. She was hogtied with strips of fabric from a bedding set. Still alive, her body was encased in black garbage bags and her head wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag. Christian was then stuffed inside a trash can and left to die, slowly suffocating.

       
        The house at 2316 Chipman St., Knoxville

Suspect Boyd has long denied any role in the couple’s abduction. With no forensic proof tying him to the crimes, authorities were left to prosecute him for hiding out Davidson after the slayings. He is serving an 18-year sentence as a result.

But his statement to authorities provides striking details of the carjacking, details he insisted came from Davidson, not his own memory.

Christian was angry with Newsom because he had tarried in picking her up for the birthday party of a friend. As she sat in the front seat of her Toyota 4-Runner parked outside, Newsom sought to set things right, hugging and kissing her as he stood just outside the driver’s side door.

The couple never saw Boyd cruise into the parking lot at Washington Ridge with passengers Davidson and Cobbins. An armed Boyd and Davidson jumped from the car, leaving Cobbins behind. At that point, the pair intended only to rob Christian and Newsom of the SUV. But as they approached the couple, guns drawn, headlights from another vehicle spooked them. They pushed the couple into the SUV.

Testimony has shown that Christian and Newsom were bound in the SUV with whatever cords the assailants could find. Newsom was forced facedown in the vehicle. A bound Christian was dumped onto his back.

With Davidson behind the wheel of Christian’s SUV and Cobbins trailing behind in a car Boyd had borrowed from his cousin, the crew headed back to Davidson’s Chipman Street home.

There was no doubt then that the couple would die.

“Two white people, white kids, this (expletive) fixing to get crazy, man, you know what I mean?” Cobbins said.

Davidson and his cohorts are black, the victims white. Racial differences have never been suggested as a motivator for what authorities view as a random carjacking.

The perpetrators were never charged with “hate crimes.”

Diversity Macht Frei, 5 Jan 2017:

               
Alex Cioni, leader del Comitato Prima Noi, condannato dal Tribunale di Vicenza a 5 giorni di galera e 1.310 euro di ammenda per manifestazione non autorizzata.

Virtually every day, when I read Italian patriot sites, I see stories about asylum seekers, mainly sub-Saharans, staging spontaneous demonstrations, blocking traffic, holding up hand-scrawled placards protesting about something or other, usually the quality of the food they are given. Usually I don’t even bother posting articles about these incidents here, because there are simply too many of them.

Sometimes the police divert traffic so the invaders can carry on their protests undisturbed; sometimes they talk to them and persuade them to return to their accommodation; they almost never arrest them unless the invaders physically attack them. But here we have an incident where a small group of Italian patriots gathered and held up banners for a few minutes at a hotel that had been marked as a future asylum centre. And were charged and convicted for doing so. The incident in question is shown in the video above. Their banners say things like “Stop fake refugees. Stop the Asylum Industry”.

  Five days in prison and a fine of 1,310 euros. This is the penalty imposed on Alex Cioni, leader of the Prima Noi Committee, by the Vicenza Tribunal His offence was to have demonstrated in front of a hotel marked as a future reception centre for migrants to show his disagreement with the arrival of the refugees.

  The incident took place last 17 July when some representatives of the Prima Noi Committee displayed a banner and placards in front of the glass door in the Hotel Eden in Schio, expressing their unhappiness about the announced arrival of a substantial number of asylum seekers. An unauthorised demonstration, because - according to the judge - no request had been made in advance to the authorities responsible for public security.

  Cioni was convicted for this reason, although the sentence was suspended because he had no criminal record. “The complaint filed by the Digos officials and the related judgement from the tribunal in Vicenza,” said the Committee management, “represents an unequivocal clumsy attempt to intimidate our activity.”

  “A banner in a private place is not a demonstration for which reason the conviction for demonstrating is absurd,” the person involved explained to the Alto Vicentino Online. “It makes no sense to call an initiative like ours a demonstration, lasting only a few minutes. It is clear the incident has been instrumentalised.” Cioni will file an appeal however

Source

TNO, “Germany: 3,000 Sex Attack Victims in 2016”, 4 Jan 2016:

Third World invaders pretending to be refugees in Germany preyed upon 2,000 adults and 1,000 children in 2015, a new study by monitoring group XZ Einzefall has shown - at least 1,964 of the sex attacks were serious,

The true number of attacks and victims is much higher, because police are under orders to withhold hundreds of reports and only respond if the media makes inquiries.

XY Einzefall is a German-based monitoring group which has carefully recorded every sex assault carried out in Germany since Angela Merkel opened that country’s gates to the mass Third World invasion in 2015.

Their final report for 2016, which can be found in spreadsheet format here, reveals that reported incidents only total 1,964, consisting of at least 201 rapes, 1,559 sex attacks, and 204 sex attacks in public swimming pools.

Only incidents which were actually reported by the police, or which were reported in the controlled media, were added to the XZ Einzefall list. Their spreadsheet contains the links to the police and media reports.

Of the 201 reported rapes, at least 35 were minors, the study showed. Of the 1,559 sex attacks, 653 victims were minors, and of the 204 swimming pool sex attacks, 286 were minors.

This works out at nearly six serious sex attacks every day during 2016.

However, as XY Einzelfall points out in its study, these figures are merely the tip of the iceberg. Quoting a separate study in Austria, the groups said that “only a tiny fraction of all crimes are published as a police or media-report.”

The Austrian study quoted compared complaints laid with the police to those reported by the police’s media officers and those reported in the media. The difference was vast, the study said, finding that in Vienna, of the more than 200,000 complaints made to police, less than 2,000 police reports were actually published.

With regard to rape cases, the study found, of the 647 rapes reported to the police, only 15 were ever mentioned by police reports and media.

“For this reason,” the study says, “the total number of crimes committed by migrants is much higher.”

XZ Einzelfall also maintains an incident map which is regularly updated and which can be found here.

10NewsDK, “48 stains of semen found after refugee gang rape mother of two”, 31 Dec 2016:

The Swedish mother of two was gang-raped to the sound of laughter and joyful shouts by at least nine refugees at a refugee camp in Småland Mariannelund, Sweden. The woman was almost apathetic after the rape and still feels that she has something stuffed in the genital area. Today, the prosecutor presented the evidence, consisting of semen probes, against nine men, of whom several defends their actions against the woman.

 
Photo of Rafi Bahaduri, translator for the Swedish state and one of the accused gang rapists.

  ‘She is a whore,’ says the Swedish Migration Board interpreter Bahaduri Rafi, 25, who is one of the defendants. …

  Prosecutor Gunnar Brodin disclosed that forensic scientists found 48 semen stains in the refugee apartment where the gang rape took place. Inside the victim’s rectum and farther up the digestive system was recovered sperm from at least four people. In total, nine men are connected to the rape.

  Besides the sadistic gang rape, which was committed by Afghan refugees, the mother of two was close to death because her airways was clogged during the rape, stated courtroom clerk Charlotte Bokelund during the trial. …

  The mother of two, who have chosen to follow the trial, repeatedly felt so bad that she had to leave the courtroom to vomit.

48 semen deposits and at least 4 in her rectum were found. She was near death after incident.

Kevin Crehan, 35, executed in his cell at HMP Bristol

DM, “Man jailed for leaving a bacon sandwich outside a mosque is found dead in prison halfway through his 12-month sentence”, 30 Dec 2016:

• He was serving a one-year sentence for racist attack on a Bristol mosque
   
• Crehan and accomplices left bacon sandwiches outside the building
   
• They also left a St George flag outside with ‘No Mosques’ written on it
   
• Man jailed after leaving bacon sandwiches outside mosque been found dead in his cell.

Kevin Crehan, 35, was halfway through a one-year prison sentence he received in July after admitting the racially-motivated attack on the Jamia Mosque in Bristol earlier this year.

He was accompanied by Alison Bennett, 46, and Mark Bennett, 48, and Angelina Swales, 31, who also pleaded guilty over the incident.

A St George flag with the words ‘no mosques’ was also tied to the fence outside the building in Totterdown, Bristol, and shouted racial abuse at a worshipper.

Bacon was tied to the door handles and sandwiches made of raw meat and sliced white bread were left at the entrance, in what was described in court by the judge as an ‘an attack on England’.

The prison service confirmed Crehan was found dead in his cell at HMP Bristol on Tuesday, December 27.

A spokesman told the Sun: ‘HMP Bristol prisoner Kevin Crehan died in custody on Tuesday 27 December.

       
The incident occurred at Jamia Mosque in Totterdown, Bristol, pictured, and all four of the gang were banned from going near a mosque for 10 years

‘As with all deaths in custody, the independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman will investigate.’

Crehan was jailed for a year while Bennett was given a nine-month sentence.

Bennett was given a six-month sentence and Swales was given a four-month sentence - both suspended for two years.

They were all banned from going within 330ft of a mosque anywhere in England or Wales for the next 10 years.

EUObserver, “The rise and shine of Visegrad”, 30 Dec 2016:

The Visegrad leaders have made their voices heard on the EU stage.
         
From left to right, Robert Fico, Beata Szydlo, Bohuslav Sobotka and Viktor Orban. (Photo: Czech government)

The name of a quiet medieval town in Hungary – Visegrad – has in recent times become synonymous with the word “rebellion” in Brussels.

Others, particularly if they are from one of the four countries in the loose association of the Visegrad Group, might argue that it stands for “alternative”.

  V4 countries are trying to weigh in on the EU’s soul-searching process which was launched at a summit in Bratislava in September. (Photo: Kurt Bauschardt)

The group, also known as V4, was formed in Visegrad in 1991 and is comprised of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It has remained relatively obscure for almost 25 years.

Then the migration crisis hit.

The EU’s inability to handle the crisis, combined with a tilt in the power structure within the union after the Brexit vote and increasingly bellicose and eurosceptic leaders in Hungary and Poland, has thrust the group to the fore.

In 2016, V4 leaders have pushed for a change in the EU’s migration policy and has refused to accept asylum seekers under the EU’s quota system. They also called for reform of the EU after the Brexit vote.

“The V4 basically fulfilled the role it was created for in the first place, to be a powerful lobby organisation.” Daniel Bartha, the director of the Budapest-based Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, told Euobserver.

“It now holds on to a significant number of votes in the European Council to offset Germany.”
The original sin

Diplomats refer to a meeting of interior ministers in September 2015, when the four states were out-voted on migrant quotas, as the “original sin” that emboldened the group.

The V4 countries disagreed with the mandatory part of the system - even though in the end Poland, under its previous government, did not vote with the rest of the Visegrad nations - and particularly disliked how the European Commission rammed through its German-inspired proposal.

A year after the migration quotas were introduced, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico declared the idea politically dead. “Quotas today clearly divide the EU, therefore I think they are politically finished,” he told journalists while his country was holding the rotating EU presidency.

Eastern EU states were not the only ones that did not like the quota system, but they were the most vocal about it, with Hungary and Slovakia challenging it in the EU Court of Justice.

Strong anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Visegrad leaders was initially criticised, but eventually the focus of the EU’s migration policy shifted from taking in asylum seekers and distributing them fairly, to reinforcing border control and shutting down migration routes.

The issue has finally forced the realisation in the corridors of the Berlaymont, the EU commission’s headquarters, that V4 countries could not be ignored.

But as one EU official observed, commission president Jean-Claude Juncker still surrounds himself with a small circle of close aides and is less open to influence from the V4.

The official gave the example of the commission proposal on “posted workers”, which would require companies from the eastern EU to pay as much to their workers sent to Western Europe as their western counterparts.

In principle, the proposal makes sense in a single market, and some Western European states have long objected to easterners undercutting local wages. But 11 national parliaments objected to the commission’s proposal, the bulk of them eastern nations. The commission decided in July to move ahead with the proposal anyway.
After Brexit vote

The Brexit vote was a shock to the EU, but it reinforced the V4’s presence.

It has been interpreted as a vote against the ruling elite and mainstream politics, a public sentiment that Hungarian and Polish leaders have been successfully exploiting. Those two nations took it as a sign that the EU needs to change, and they were ready with an alternative.

“The European Commission hasn’t fully understood what happened in the British referendum,” Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo told reporters in July, when her country took over the V4 rotating presidency.

“The EU needs to return to its roots. We need to care more about the concerns of citizens and less about those of the institutions.”

Similarly, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban said in June that democratic legitimacy for the EU can only come from the member states.

“We have to return to the notion that the basis of the EU is not its institutions, but the member states. The democratic feature of the EU can only be reinforced through the member states,” he said after the British referendum.

There is yet a concrete proposal, but in the Slovak capital in September, the 27 member states kicked off a soul-searching “Bratislava process” to explore how the EU could be reformed to win back citizens, and the V4’s ideas are bound to be influential.

“After Brexit, the EU’s political centre of gravity has shifted towards the east,” said analyst Daniel Bartha.

“France has had a declining economy since the early 2010s, so it has been less potent in offsetting Germany’s dominance on the continent. New power centres are destined to emerge in the union.”

But the V4’s rise in EU politics might only be temporary, as many issues divide the four nations and would hamper their ability to influence EU politics.

“The harmony only exists from the outside. Migration is the key issue where the four agreed. On everything else – for instance energy – there is little agreement,” said Bartha.

He cited as an example relations with Russia – a friend to Hungary but still regarded as a threat in Poland.

And Slovakia’s government has largely muted its opposition to EU migration policy during its presidency of the EU Council.

EU officials have suggested engaging with the “more reasonable” elements within the V4 – Slovakia and the Czech Republic – to separate them from Poland and Hungary whenever possible.

“They need our gestures. It is that moment,” argued one EU official.

Iohannis stops accession of Muslim Prime Minister

Visigrad Post, “Romania On The Brink Of A Political Crisis”, 28 Dec 2016:

Romania – President Klaus Iohannis rejected the nomination of the country’s first ever Muslim – and woman – candidate for Prime Minister, Sevil Shhaideh.

After winning the election early December, the PSD – Social Democrats – had to nominate a candidate for the office of Prime Minister. The president of the PSD, Liviu Dragnea is unable to become Prime Minister as he has been preliminarily refused by President Iohannis as he has been convicted for electoral fraud. Hence, he proposed Sevil Shhaideh, and it was likely he’d run the government through her.

Although President Klaus Iohannis asked the Social Democrats to pick someone else to lead the government, but he did not give any reason for this rejection.

Mr Dragnea has previously suggested he will fight any attempt by the president to block his choice of Prime Minister. “If Iohannis rejects our proposal, I’m not going to make a second one. We’ll see each other in some other place,” he said.

                             
          Sevil Shhaideh - rejected nominee for Romania’ first ever Muslim – and woman - Prime Minister

Following the rejection, Mr Dragnea said he could begin the process of seeking to remove Mr Iohannis as president. “It seems the president clearly wants to be suspended,” Mr Dragnea said. “We’ll weigh our options very carefully, because we don’t want to take emotional decisions. We don’t want to trigger a political crisis for nothing, but if we come to the conclusion that the president must be suspended, I won’t hesitate.” As a matter of fact, several political observers claim that the two refusals – the first one, unofficial, of Dragnea, and the second one of Shhaideh – are unconstitutional.

On December 28, Mr Dragnea proposed Sorin Grindeanu as candidate for Prime Minister. President Iohannis is expected to name the Prime Minister on December 29. According to the Romanian constitution, if the candidate is not nominated by the President, the parliament will be dissolved and new elections will be held.

        President Iohannis is indeed going along with the nomination of Grindeanu -

Sofia Globe “Romanian president designates Grindeanu new prime minister”, 30 Dec 2016:
 
President Klaus Iohannis has designated veteran leftist Sorin Grindeanu as the new Romanian head of government. Previously, Iohannis refused to endorse a female, Muslim candidate who was criticized for her inexperience.

The 43-year-old Sorin Grindeanu would have 10 days to unveil his cabinet and seek the parliament’s vote of confidence after being named by Iohannis on Friday.

The process is expected to go smoothly for the former telecommunications minister after the triumph of his moderate left PSD party in the parliamentary election earlier this month. The PSD won 45 percent of the seats and now holds a firm majority with their junior partners, the ALDE.

Grindeanu is a mathematician who has served as deputy mayor of the western city of Timisoara.

Tory MP Philip Hollobone said: “Migration Watch’s forecasts have always been thoroughly reliable.”

Express, “BREXIT WARNING: 12 MILLION more migrants to arrive in UK in 25 years without hard Brexit”, 29 Dec 2016:

MASS immigration will continue at “unacceptable” levels for at least two decades unless Britain makes a full break with Brussels, a report predicted last night.

               

Figures showed that annual net migration to the UK from EU countries would be unlikely to fall below 155,000 in the “medium term” if the country stays in the EU’s Single Market.

And the Government’s ability to reduce the influx will be “extremely limited” as long as the EU’s free movement rules remain in force.

The disturbing forecast of near-record levels of migration for years ahead was set out in a report from the population think tank Migration Watch. It was being seen last night as a devastating blow to campaigners for a so-called “soft Brexit” that retain the UK’s full Single Market membership.

[...]

“An increase of anything like 12 million in just 25 years is, quite simply, unacceptable to the British public and certainly not what they voted for in the referendum.”

Tory MP Philip Hollobone said: “Migration Watch’s forecasts have always been thoroughly reliable and are the best we are going to get from anyone.

[...]

“The picture they paint is completely unacceptable.

“We simply can’t stay in the Single Market if it means we are going to get that sort of level of immigration.

“Above all, people voted in the referendum for a change in our approach to immigration.”

[...]

“Total net immigration will add 12 million people to the population in just 25 years, more than the equivalent of the entire current populations of Bulgaria and New Zealand.”

He added: “Theresa May needs to set out in no uncertain terms that when the UK leaves the EU it will also cease to be a member of the Single Market.