White family attacked, knocked unconscious at gas station for being in “wrong neighborhood”

Imagine for a second if two white men and a white woman at a gas station/convenience store in Louisiana told a black family that they were in the wrong neighborhood and that they weren’t going to make it out. Then each of the white suspects proceeds to knock unconscious the father, the mother, and the teenage daughter by hitting each of them in the face.

Then image that only one of the three suspects was charged with 2nd degree battery and arrested while the other two were released on simple battery changes even though they each rendered a person unconscious by striking them in the face.

This would be a national story and the country would be OUTRAGED on multiple levels at this incident, with everyone from movie actors to government leaders decrying the racist actions of these white individuals. We would be told there is still racism alive an well in America by people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton while they give speeches and rile the people up in this Louisiana town. And the police, oh they would be hamstrung for being racist because they only arrested one of the suspects and let two of them go.

The president would then weigh in on it and say the police acted stupidly after having someone in the press ask him about it so he could claim moral high ground and call it a teaching moment for the country.

And that would be the story running on all the major news outlets and evening news shows so that everyone in the country would know about it within a matter of hours.

But this story below, which is almost exactly the picture I painted for you above except that I switched the races of the suspects and the victims, won’t be given much attention at all if any. And it certainly won’t be called ‘racist’. It will just be the work of some deviant individuals but it won’t reflect on the country as a whole nor on the state of Louisiana.

WAFB – He was in the “wrong neighborhood” is just one reason a man gave as to why he was punched in the face. His wife and daughter were also hit.

Police arrested one man and ticketed two others. They are all accused of punching the family.

At the corner of Plank Road and Scenic Highway in Baton Rouge sits a Chevron gas station. It’s off I-110 near Memorial Stadium. A family stopped there to get gas Sunday around 10 p.m.

“Upon our arrival, we located three victims who were attacked in the parking lot,” said Cpl. Tommy Stubbs, spokesperson for the Baton Rouge Police Department.

The owners of the gas station did not want to comment on camera, but said there’s a wide variety of customers in and out of the store in the daytime. At night, though, it’s not the safest of places, especially with the area having some of the highest crime in the city.

“It was a small scene but it got to be a big scene after the fight broke out and it was a big scene when the police came,” said Keisha Henderson, a witness.

Stubbs said a man wearing a pink shirt was in line trying to pay for gas when Donald Dickerson, 41, started making fun of him, leading to an argument.

“The defendant (Dickerson) approached the white male victim,” the police report stated.

It went on to read, “the defendant told him he was in the wrong neighborhood and he was not going to make it out.” The victim said that’s when he “was punched and knocked to the ground.”

At this time, his wife got out of the car and ran to help her husband. The victim said, “he continued to struggle with the defendant and was eventually knocked unconscious, which later he awoke in the hospital.”

His wife told police, “after running to help her husband, she remembers falling to the ground and (being) knocked unconscious.”

According to a close family friend, that’s when the couple’s teenage daughter got out of the car to check on her parents and, “observed a female punch her mother in the face, when her mother then fell to the concrete, hitting her head on the surface.”

The daughter was also punched in the face.

“There were only three suspects but there were multiple people in the parking lot,” said Stubbs.

Of those three, Dickerson was arrested and charged with second-degree battery. The other two suspects, Devin Bessye, 24, and Ashley Simmons, 22, were released on site after police wrote them each a summons for simple battery.

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