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Natural selection. Running over dumb animals in the roadway is
not a crime.

Jared Benjamin Lafer, who last September drove his SUV through a
tiny assemblage of Black Lives Matter protesters in Johnson
City, Tennessee, and then sped away — leaving behind a man with
a concussion, brain bleed, and two broken legs — will face no
charges.

On Monday, a Tennessee grand jury returned a “no true” bill — a
declaration by jurors that there was not enough evidence to
indict the 27-year-old even after a judge had reduced the
charges against him from aggravated assault, a Class C felony,
to reckless aggravated assault, a Class D felony. Among the
materials that apparently left the grand jurors unmoved was
cellphone video documenting Lafer rolling over the protester
with his truck, narrowly missing the protester’s dog, and almost
striking a second person who jumped out of the car’s unswerving
path before it accelerated away from the scene.

The same footage made the rounds on social media last year as
Tennessee police conducted a two-day manhunt for the hit-and-run
driver, who they identified as Lafer after witnesses identified
his out-of-state licence plate number. Lafer never returned to
the scene to check on his victim, but instead drove to his home
state of North Carolina, hired a lawyer to talk with the cops on
the case, and turned himself in two days after committing the
crime.

By the time of the arrest, Lafer’s earlier social media posts
joking about running over protesters had been scrubbed from the
internet, preserved only in screengrabs captured by a local
progressive news site.

Victoria Hewlett, who was sitting in a parked car with her
husband at an intersection just yards from the scene, told The
Daily Beast that protesters were crossing the road in a pattern
consistent with the walk signal. She says that Lafer pulled up
behind her car, then swerved around her vehicle “pretty
aggressively,” before rounding the corner and driving “directly
into where the protesters were in the crosswalk.” She says — and
Jonathan Bowers, Lafer’s primary victim, also states in a
hospital-bed affidavit and subsequent testimony — that Lafer
rolled slowly, without breaking, into the intersection, “bumped”
him with his truck, and then suddenly “floored” the vehicle,
running him over and leaving him unconscious in the road.

Bowers, Hewlett recalls, regained consciousness shortly
thereafter, “screaming in pain” and asking about his dog.
Hewlett and her husband, who had already begun filming, caught
the scene and immediate aftermath on camera. She told me she saw
no one beating on or otherwise attacking Lafer’s car, which
comports with what’s captured on video.

“The only thing that had occurred” before Lafler ran over
Bowers, Hewlett recalls, was that protesters “kind of looked at
him like, what the fuck? That’s where he apparently feels
threatened. After he drives into people and they’re stunned and
throwing their hands up, like what are you doing, that’s what
he’s trying to construe as being in danger,” Hewlett told me.

This issue of safety, Lafer’s in particular, is where defense
lawyers centered their argument, claiming that Lafer “found
himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, faced with what he
perceived as a dangerous condition, dangerous situation,”
according to defense attorney Mac Meade. “His entire family, his
wife and his three young kids under the age of six were all in
the car with him. And he did what he felt was necessary to get
out of a situation that he felt was dangerous to his family.”

There were about 10 assembled pedestrian protesters at this
“dangerous situation,” most of whom the video indicates were at
a distance from the car until they ran to check on Bowers (who,
for the record, is white) after Lafer mowed him down and ran him
over.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project identified 69
malicious ramming attacks against protesters between May 28 and
September 15 of 2020. Another group of terrorism researchers
from the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats
found that between May 27 and September 5 of 2020, people drove
vehicles into protesters 104 times. At least 43 of those cases
involved drivers with obvious malicious intent, demonstrated by
the yelling of racial epithets or other aggressive acts. Of
those 104 drivers, just 39 faced any criminal charges.

The fuel for these attacks likely came from multiple sources.
“Run them over” had become a rightwing social media catchphrase
as far back as 2015, after the Ferguson uprising, and memes
about vehicular homicide against protesters — like those Lafter
promoted before his accounts were deactivated — have
proliferated since. In 2017, Fox News ran an article headlined
"Here's A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To
Block The Road.” (“Study the technique; it may prove useful in
the next four years,” the author urged.) They quietly removed
the piece moths later, three days after a white nationalist at
the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville used his car to
murder Heather Heyer.

In recent years, conservative legislators around the country
have responded to demonstrations and uprisings with anti-protest
bills that, in addition to threatening folks’ constitutional
rights, protect drivers who used their cars in attacks against
protesters. Most of those failed to become law, but in the
months following the police murder of George Floyd and the
demonstrations that ensued, eight states have passed legislation
that aims to have a chilling impact on political protest and
free speech; another 21 have proposals in the works.

In Oklahoma — where last June, the driver of a pickup truck
pulling a horse trailer drove through a crowd of BLM protesters,
paralyzing one, but faced no charges because he claimed to be
scared for the safety of him and his family — a recently signed
law gives immunity to drivers who run protesters over.

The boundless anti-protest bill that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
signed off on has stalled in court, at least temporarily, since
a judge issued a preliminary injunction against sections, noting
the law “emboldens civilians to hit protesters with their cars.”
In response to DeSantis using an upcoming West Palm Beach
“Juneteenth Black Joy Celebration” as just cause for the the
law, the judge wrote in his decision that it “should go without
saying that a public gathering of Black people celebrating
‘Black joy’ and release from bondage does not automatically
equate to a protest — or something that the governor apparently
implies should be chilled.”

Though Tennessee succeeded in passing an anti-assembly bill that
doubles down on criminalization of actions that were already
outlawed, this legislative session saw a second bill supporting
vehicular ramming of protesters die. Not that it mattered in
Lafer’s case, since the grand jury didn’t see anything criminal
here.

That’s the thing about all these anti-protest laws: they deny
the most vulnerable the right to demand that their personhood be
recognized, while protecting the same people who are always
allowed to deny that personhood. We already know how the system
works. This whole anti-protest legislative movement takes pains
to explicitly tell folks to stay in their place and put up with
the various injustices this country inflicts upon them — or to
suffer the consequences.

I asked Hewlett how she reacted upon finding out that Lafer
would face no charges. She expressed a similar jaded lack of
surprise.

“I’m obviously appalled by the whole process,” she said. “But I
had been getting trickles of information that the charges were
getting reduced, so I already wasn’t super hopeful.

“It’s just been a slow burn of they’re going to let this guy get
away with this. That’s how it always goes. I don’t really know
what else to say at this point.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-ran-over-black-lives-matter- protestersbut-apparently-thats-not-a-crime

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