White Guy Kills Two Black Men, Third Suspect Who Broke In Home Now Charged With Murder
The story is shaking from the start family. Renato Hughes Jr. claims he and his boys were just going to buy some weed at this cat's house at 4:00am in the morning when suddenly things got crazy. Number 1, why is he buying weed. Number 2, why is he buying weed at the crack of dawn. Number 3, why did it take three brothers to make the purchase???
If we sound a little skeptical, you're very perceptive. Whatever went down, Renato Hughes is going to trial Nov. 27 for allegedly breaking into a man's rural Northern California home. He ends up shooting two of them and kills them. As a result, Hughes, 22, is being charged by prosecutors in this overwhelmingly White county under a rarely invoked legal doctrine that could make him responsible for the bloodshed.
District Attorney Jon Hopkins believes that Hughes is responsible for "setting the whole thing in motion by his actions and the actions of his accomplices." Prosecutors said homeowner Shannon Edmonds opened fire Dec. 7 2006 after three young men rampaged through the Clearlake house demanding marijuana and brutally beat his stepson. Rashad Williams, 21, and Christian Foster, 22, were shot in the back.
The 'Provocative Act' doctrine is what's being used to charged Hughes with first-degree murder The doctrine only requires prosecutors to prove the accused "should have reasonably foreseeable that the criminal enterprise could trigger a fatal response from the homeowner.The NAACP maintains that prosecutors are being too hard on Hughes, who also faces robbery, burglary and assault charges. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty. The Rev. Amos Brown, head of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP and pastor at Hughes' church, said the case demonstrates the legal system is racist in remote Lake County, aspiring wine country 100 miles north of San Francisco. The sparsely populated county of 13,000 people is 91 percent white and 2 percent black.
Brown and other NAACP officials are asking why the homeowner is walking free. Tests showed Edmonds had marijuana and prescription medication in his system the night of the shooting. Edmonds had a prescription for both the pot and the medication to treat depression. "They were shot in the back. They had fled," said Brown. The district attorney said that race played no part in the charges against Hughes and that the homeowner was spared prosecution because of evidence he was defending himself and his family, who were asleep when the assailants barged in.
Edmonds' stepson, Dale Lafferty, suffered brain damage from the baseball bat beating he took during the melee. The 19-year-old lives in a rehab center and can no longer feed himself. "I'm sad the kids are dead, I didn't mean to kill them, " said Edmonds, 33. "Race has nothing to do with it other than this was a gang of black people who thought they were going to beat up this white family." Hughes' mother, San Francisco schoolteacher Judy Hughes, said she believes the group didn't intend to rob the family, just buy marijuana. She called the case against her son a "legal lynching." "Only God knows what happened in that house," she said. "But this I know: My son did not murder his childhood friends."
MSNBC