Four shoppers plotted an attack against a 24-year-old man they encountered in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, then followed him to the parking lot and beat him—all because the man is black, a federal prosecutor told a jury Thursday.
But the attorney for Richard Armstrong, one of the shoppers, countered that his client only got into a fight last year on Independence Day because he’s a paranoid methamphetamine user—not a racist.
The swastika tattoos on his chest, hand and ankle are relics from time spent in a juvenile facility in California and not a symbol of his beliefs, attorney Wade Curtis said in opening statements as the federal hate crime trial began in Boise.
Raylen Smith, now 25, testified that he was born and raised in the mostly white region of southwestern Idaho. He said the attack was the first time he’d been accosted because of his race.
“I was scared because I had never had anything like that happen before,” he said. “I thought that I was going to die, or I was going to get beat up.”
U.S. Trial Attorney Erin Aslan said the shoppers beat Smith repeatedly until he blacked out.
“Defendant Michael Bullard was the instigator. Defendant Jennifer Hartpence was the enabler and accomplice, and Defendant Richard Armstrong was the assailant,” Aslan said.
Bullard, Hartpence, Armstrong and James D. Whitewater were indicted in the beating by a federal grand jury last year on charges of conspiring to harm Smith because of his race and aiding and abetting one another in the assault.
But Wednesday, Whitewater pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and agreed to testify against the other defendants, and in exchange prosecutors dropped the aiding and abetting charge.
Smith said he first noticed the four in the milk aisle, and saw them again as they went through a nearby checkout line. It was in the parking lot, Smith said, that Bullard approached him, asking him what country he thought he was in.
“I turned around toward the front of Wal-Mart. I heard somebody say, ‘Get him,’ and someone say, ‘nigger,’” Smith said. “I just kept running. I was just trying to get away.”
When he reached a ditch, he turned around to face Bullard because he had nowhere left to run and needed to defend himself, Smith said. Bullard tackled him, and the two rolled down a slope.
Smith said he got in a head-butt and a punch before Armstrong joined the melee, kicking and punching Smith as he lay on the ground. He passed out, and when he awoke, the group was gone, Smith said.
Smith said he didn’t seek medical treatment, although he was sore and bruised the next day and still has some pain in his shoulder and back.
The case is one of perceptions, said Bullard’s attorney, Elisa Massoth. Though Smith believed it was a racial attack, Bullard saw the incident as an exchange of dirty looks that ended in a fight and had nothing to do with race, she said.
“My client Michael Bullard is the one that ended up with more cuts and bruises that day,” Massoth told the jury.
The story of the fight morphed and expanded over the last year until it was called a beating with racial epithets, she said.
Hartpence was simply a woman who accompanied her boyfriend, Bullard, to the Wal-Mart in Nampa—about 15 miles west of Boise—and was unaware of any animosity in the group toward Smith until the fight broke out, said her attorney, John DeFranco. Rather than an accomplice, Hartpence was more of a confused bystander, he said.
The trial is expected to last through July 24. If convicted, Bullard, Armstrong and Hartpence each face up to 20 years in federal prison.
Rebecca Boone, AP
