Church News: Black Teenager Hanged At White Ohio Evangelical Youth Retreat. Suicide or Lynching?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Murder or suicide: Black youth’s death newly probed
Racially motivated foul play alleged in mother’s suit
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Julie Carr Smyth
Associated Press

Bellefontaine, Ohio — Investigators explored whether a black teenager found hanging at a church youth retreat might have been murdered rather than have committed suicide, according to investigative reports from the days following James McCoy III’s death.

Yet the boy’s mother, who has filed a lawsuit alleging racially motivated foul play, said Friday she still does not believe authorities did enough to determine what happened the day McCoy died.

“I don’t feel that if this was a reverse situation, if a Caucasian boy had died at an all-black church event, that it would have been handled in the same way,” Tonya Amoako-Okyere said.
McCoy was found hanging from a tree on April 22, 2006, his 18th birthday, in a remote area of Camp Cotubic, a Christian camp east of Bellefontaine, about 60 miles northwest of Columbus.

Amoako-Okyere filed a wrongful death suit against Church of the Messiah in Westerville near Columbus, which sponsored the camp; four unnamed youths who attended the event; and four unnamed Logan County authorities. The suit was moved last week to U.S. District Court.

Bishop Bruce Ough, who leads the Methodist region to which McCoy’s church belongs, issued a statement saying his administration “is supportive of the staff and leadership of Messiah as they seek truth and justice in this matter.” His office said he was traveling Friday and unable to discuss specifics of the suit.

McCoy’s mother said in a telephone interview that she had heard friends chastising her son for having a white girlfriend. He told his mother just before the retreat that he planned to buy her an engagement ring, she said.

Yet Amoako-Okyere said she was barely questioned by authorities about what she knew, which included the fact that some of her son’s friends had previously experimented with a “choking game” and that her son rarely wore belts like the one wrapped around his neck when he died. She said she was never asked to identify the belt.

Still, Logan County sheriff’s records reveal that deputies did not ignore race as an issue in the incident. At least one key witness was asked whether she thought McCoy’s death might have been intentional and race-related. Another was asked whether anyone wanted to hurt McCoy for any reason. The answer to both questions was no.

Deputies also accumulated a number of documents, including statements McCoy made in a prayer journal from the camp and on a personal Web page on Xanga.com, a social networking site similar to MySpace.

“I am in a world of trouble . . .,” he wrote on the site. “No matter what I do, something will happen . . . it is times like these that i wish i wasnt alive . . .”

McCoy’s prayer journal read: “I’m going to hell. I [expletive] hate myself. But I don’t care. I will keep doing it until I get the nerve to end it.”

Amoako-Okyere said the journal writings didn’t appear to her to be in her son’s handwriting, use his vocabulary, or reflect his thoughts.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks like an awful lot more than meets the eye. The Columbus Dispatch has more detail:

The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the family’s complaint that this was a hate crime and closed the case.

Amoako-Okyere is represented by Clifford Arnebeck Jr. and Robert Fitrakis of Columbus. Arnebeck said yesterday that McCoy died because the other teens choked or hanged him as part of a birthday prank. Then, the kids wrote papers full of despondent and suicidal thoughts, attributed the writings to McCoy and gave them to authorities, Arnebeck said.

McCoy, who had been a popular, well-liked senior at Westerville South High School, had a bull’s-eye on his back at the conservative church because he was dating a white girl, Arnebeck said.

A woman who answered the phone at the Church of the Messiah yesterday afternoon said the church had no comment.

The Logan County sheriff’s office investigated McCoy’s death, and Sheriff Michael Henry had no comment yesterday. But in the days after the incident, he said he was confident that his deputies acted appropriately and that race played no role in their conclusion that the young man had killed himself.

The sheriff’s case files include a written statement from a friend who wrote that McCoy had been having trouble at home and was upset about illnesses and a recent death in the family. The friend wrote that McCoy previously had tried to kill himself.

Also in the file are writings that the church’s assistant youth pastor said he found two days after McCoy’s death and turned over to authorities. They include a prayer journal said to be McCoy’s that says: “I hate myself. I want to do die.”

Arnebeck said the notes are not in McCoy’s handwriting and are evidence of a cover-up.

I have no idea what the truth of this tragedy is, but even a casual perusal of US history (and particularly that of Ohio) tells me that a black male teenager + white girlfriend + a fatal hanging does not generally turn out to be the result of suicide.

That the US Justice Department investigated and dismissed this case as a potential hate crime isn’t reassuring, given that Justice’s civil rights division has been deliberately subverted by the Bush administration’s installation by the back door of unqualified, pro ‘white-rights’, fundamentalist ‘lawyers’ from bible schools and fundy diploma mills into posts that are supposed to be filled by the nation’s brightest and best legal talents. The Justice department, which should oversee everyone’s civil rights, is now a tool of the GOP used to push a racist, far right agenda.

Do we really think these people could find a white evangelical church had committed a hate crime? Oh, please.