Two white Florida men targeted a 16-year-old Black boy in the same neighborhood where Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, according to Newsone. The teen took a video of the incident, explaining in the caption that the men “didn’t like the way he was driving” and threw a large rock through his window.
The teen, Jermaine, wrote that the men approached him while he was driving through his friend’s neighborhood in Sanford, Florida. He took a video of the men and posted the scene to social media.
“They didn’t like the way I was driving, so they felt the need to hit my car with a cone, and throw a rock through my window. All I wanted to do was de-escalate until police came because I wasn’t about to get charges pressed on me for no reason,” he wrote in the caption of his Instagram post.
The footage was far more disturbing than the initial report of what happened.
A few other white residents came around to record. In the video you can hear someone shout “Get out of this neighborhood! You don’t belong here!” Jermaine also asks one of the men who they said had a gun. “You’re the one who’d get a gun,” responds a woman recording on her cellphone.
Jermaine’s sister tweeted images of his car afterwards. The back window was shattered and the car door was dented and scratched, totaling over $1,000 in property damages.
Reports say one of the men, Donald Corsi was charged with weapon offenses for sending a “missile” into a vehicle. The other, Howard Hughes, was charged with first-degree misdemeanor battery. Both also have charges of criminal mischief.
All of this went down in the same neighborhood where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was racially profiled. Martin was shot and killed as a result. By the size of that rock, you could argue these men wanted to kill Jermaine.
“Yesterday my 16-year-old brother was racially profiled in a neighborhood in Sanford Florida, the same city as Trayvon Martin. Luckily, he had a different fate. I commend my brother for how he reacted in the situation. They tried to throw a brick at his head, And missed,” Jermaine’s sister tweeted.