On this date in 1999 in Independence, Virginia, Emmett Ward Cressell Jr, a 38-year-old white man with a long criminal record, was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murder of 40-year-old Garnett Paul Johnson, an African-American man, outside a rural Grayson County Virginia trailer on July 25, 1997. Cressell, who was a sawmill worker, was also fined $100,000 by the all-white jury who a day before their November 23, 1998 verdict, quickly rejected a capital murder verdict which could have given Cressell the death penalty. Cressell and co-defendant, Louis James Ceparano, 42, blame each other for burning alive and then beheading Mr. Johnson, a former marine turned handyman, outside Ceparano's trailer where the three had been drinking the night of Mr. Johnson's death. One person who testified in the case, Christy Harden, 21, had said that Ceparano told his girlfriend hours before Mr. Johnson's murder that "he was going to kill a Negro." Ceparano pleaded guilty in May, 1998 to killing Mr. Johnson and was sentenced to life in prison. Ceparano and Cressell dragged Mr. Johnson from the trailer, and Cressell, taking Mr. Johnson's wristwatch off of him, testified at his murder trial that he had said to Mr. Johnson, "You're not going to need this watch where you are going. Where you're going they have their own time."

On this date in 2004, Michael Craig Jordan, 29, of Moultrie, Georgia, was sentenced to 77 months in federal prison for his role in an April, 2002 cross-burning incident after pleading Guilty in November, 2003. Jordon, who burned the cross in an attempt to prevent a biracial African-American and Hispanic couple, and their two children, from moving into the house next door, is expected to complete his sentence on August 31, 2009, which he is serving in Mississippi. Jordan’s co-defendant, David Archie Morris was also found Guilty and he completed his federal prison sentence for his participation in this hate crime on September 29, 2004, at the age of 41.

In Hoboken, New Jersey, at the Madison Bar & Grill on this date in 2008, Carrie Covello, 37, a licensed real estate agent from Hoboken, was arrested and charged with bias intimidation and harassment for allegedly attempting to remove the turban of a Sikh man, Hansdip Singh Bindra, 38, of Union City, New Jersey. However, on April 4, 2008, the Hudson County District Attorney’s office decided not to go forward with the hate crime charge of bias intimidation. Instead, Covello, who worked for her family-run real estate company, Liberty Real Estate, at the time of the alleged offense, was to be prosecuted for intimidation, a decision that has dismayed The Sikh Coalition, a New York-based national organization. In June, 2008, The New York Times reported that Covello reached a plea agreement whereby she pleaded guilty to an unstated charge in exchange for performing 40 hours of community service for The Sikh Coalition, including gathering accounts of hate and bias against Sikhs.

At Jensen's Truck Stop on Lovers Lane in Ukiah, California, on this date in 2010, Cody Major Cranford, 21, of Redwood Valley, California, allegedly assaulted two of the truck stop's Pakistani employees, Lateef Kamal and Waqar Malik. Said to have punched the employees repeatedly about their heads and faces while hurling racial slurs at them, and said to have dragged one of the victims outside the truck stop where the assault continued, Cody M. Cranford was charged with kidnapping, burglary, committing a hate crime, and assault and battery; and, he was held in jail on $150,000 bail. This was the second of two alleged hate crimes directed at Jensen's Truck Stop employees in two weeks (see our January 12 calendar date for details of the other incident). On February 16, 2010, Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Richard Henderson ruled there was enough evidence in the case for Cranford to go to trial. On March 18, 2010, Cranford pled no contest to a felony count of assault and to a second misdemeanor count of interfering with the civil rights of another person (a hate crime).

In the Rowland Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on this date in 2011, it was discovered that someone spray-painted an outside wall of the Jehovah's Witness Rowland Heights Congregation on Killian Avenue with offensive words, phrases, and symbols, and police investigated the incident as a hate crime. Los Angeles County Sheriff Department Sgt. Angie Wilkinson said, "The graffiti was based on religion." Damage was estimated to be about $500.

On this date in 2011 in Fletcher, North Carolina, an African-American man, Tommy Dean Coleman, 50, of Fletcher, reported that he had racial slurs hurled at him by a group of people and then was assaulted at the Waffle House on Airport Road. We have no information whether or not anyone was arrested for this incident, although one media outlet reported that police believed they might know two male suspects after having reviewed surveillance video from the restaurant. The assault apparently stopped when a Waffle House customer came to the defense of Mr. Coleman. Three months earlier a woman had a crossed burned on her lawn in Fletcher. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, Fletcher was 93.60% white and only 3.30% African-American, and it is not uncommon for residents of predominently white communities to be charged with hate crimes (regardless of the bias motivation for the hate crime) or to be involved in bias-motivated violence.