For more than a month, 17-year-old Derrian Williams was known as the Liberian immigrant who committed a hate crime against a Mexican immigrant. It was a mind-boggling assertion to anyone familiar with Staten Island’s immigrant communities on the borough’s north shore. But it fit easily into the narrative that fueled last summer’s media frenzy.
Eventually, 18-year-old Christian Vasquez, the alleged Mexican victim, admitted that his beating followed an argument over a marijuana sale, a fact he omitted in the original complaint and two ensuing depositions. On September 14, after 44 days in jail, District Attorney Daniel Donovan dismissed all charges against Williams, on the grounds that the victim’s impugned credibility made it impossible to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
It was the tenth attack on a Mexican in Port Richmond this year, and a spit in the face to the NYPD, who, just 48 hours earlier flooded the neighborhood with patrol officers and turned Port Richmond Avenue into an unofficial precinct.
“Thugs Defy Cops: Commit Yet Another Bias Crime,” the Staten Island Advance headline read the next day.
The “Blacks vs. Mexicans” angle seemed consistent and was attributable to the police if it wasn’t accurate. Even though the police called it a bias attack based solely on the victim’s claim that the assailants yelled, “you fuckin Mexican,” during the beating.
That claim made it a hate crime, which typically ups a defendant’s charge one level. This would have bumped Williams’ class C felony to class B, adding 10 years to the maximum sentence.
Williams was no angel. Though the charges for the attack on Vasquez were dropped, he’s still being detained in a juvenile facility for a Family Court case. His lawyer wouldn’t comment on the case but according to two community leaders, it’s possibly in regards to a burglary he committed when he was 15-years-old.
Whatever his transgressions, Williams didn’t deserve to be blasted as a bigot by a press that lost all sense of skepticism and refused to question their perception of the hate crime narrative. No one even considered the taunts of “African Booty Scratcher,” that Liberian kids sometimes endure from their African American peers.
I don’t know what really happened or what these kids have been through. The DA’s press release about the dismissed charges says that the community needs to “exercise restraint in pre-judging these incidents.” But the community didn’t pre-judge, the police did. And the press fed the community that misinformation. Instead of looking for the truth, they settled for the facts.
