January 16

On this date in 2002 a white 17-year-old Shiloh High School senior, Michael Keith Bargeron, is alleged to have tried to intentionally strike Keishuna Young, 15, an African-American female in Snelville, Georgia with his car. According to police, Bargeron yelled racial slurs at Ms. Young and a friend of hers as he drove by them in his car in the east Atlanta suburb that was, in 2002, about 90% white. He is then alleged to have turned around and to have attempted to ram her with his car. Jumping onto the hood of Bargeron's car to avoid more serious injury, Ms. Young sustained minor injuries in the incident, and Bargeron was jailed on aggravated assault charges. Media reports have said that Bargeron was likely to have been the first person charged with Georgia's then new hate crimes law—a law which was struck down in 2004 by the Georgia Supreme Court for being too vague. On November 15, 2001, Keith Bargeron was sentenced five years on probation and was ordered to attend boot camp.

James Allen Nichols, 28, was charged on this date in 2007 with the murder of a 30-year old Hmong man in the woods near Green Bay, Wisconsin. The two were apparently hunting and allegedly began arguing. Mr. Nichols had reported that Mr. Cha Vang shot him without provocation. The Hmong community in Wisconsin has questioned whether the slaying of Vang was a hate crime. On October 6, 2007, Nichols was convicted of second degree intentional homicide.

In Georgetown, Delaware, on this date in 2008, John Hudson, 63, was arrested and held in lieu of bail for allegedly using racial slurs and making threats toward two tenants of the Briggs Apartment Complex from where Hudson was being evicted. The alleged incidents are said to have occurred from January 12-16, 2008.

In Sacramento, California, on this date in 2009, a transgendered woman, Brenda Torres, 20, was attacked inside the tunnel between Old Sacramento and the K Street Mall by two black men who shouted transgendered slurs at her. She was assaulted with a beer bottle and robbed. There were eyewitnesses, but apparently none of them called the police or intervened. Police investigated the attack/robbery as a hate crime. Ms. Torres was previously the victim of another transgender-based hate crime; in that case, her perpetrator was sentenced to prison.

In Brookhaven, Mississippi, on this date in 2009, just four days before the inauguration of President Barack Obama, a white Wisconsin man, Steven Joseph Christopher, 42, was arrested by the Secret Service and was charged with threatening to assassinate the 44th President of the United States for what Christopher claimed was "the country's own good." Christopher—who was charged with knowingly violating a domestic abuse restraining order in February, 2008 out of Walworth County, Wisconsin—is alleged to have made the threats directed at Obama on January 11, 2009, and on January 15, 2009, on an Internet website about UFOs and extraterrestrial aliens (www.alien-earth.org), and to have cyber-begged for bus fare to the Janaury 20, 2009 presidential inauguration. In one of his internet postings Christopher allegedly wrote: "It’s not because I’m racist that I will kill Barack, it’s because I can no longer allow the Jewish parasites to bully their way into making the American people submit to their evil ways."