It’s a road we’ve been down before: Three young black women claim they were assaulted by between 10 and 12 white men and women shouting racial slurs.
According to station ABC affiliate WTEN, this particular act of racial violence took place aboard an Albany, N.Y., city bus. The women are students at State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany).
One of the alleged victims tweeted about being “beaten because of the color of my skin.”
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https://twitter.com/AshaBurwell/status/693330237560602624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Like clockwork, Robert Jones, the school’s president, issued a statement condemning the attacks and paying lip service to the virtues of “inclusivity” and “diversity.”
Then the other shoe dropped. Protests on the SUNY Albany campus were spearheaded by Black Lives Matter and the National Congress of Black Women. The demands, which included the hiring of more minority faculty and providing sensitivity training for university police, seemed to have nothing to with the incident, but that was the least of the protesters’ problem.
As it turns out, the biggest crime at SUNY Albany may have been the assault on English grammar on the signs some of the protesters were carrying. Two separate news channels spoke with sources who had reviewed security footage from the bus’s surveillance camera that night, and they say there is no evidence to support the women’s claims.
Jessica Layton of WNYT reports “sources close to the investigation say the bus surveillance footage does not seem to back up what the three young women are alleging. The sources say the video tells a different story about what happened.”
WTEN also spoke to sources close to the investigation:
Officials, including the Albany County DA, are looking at security video from inside the bus. The bus had at least 12 cameras on it, which include audio. Sources tell NEWS10 ABC the video is damaging the young women’s accusations.
Asha Burwell, one of the victims, happens to be the sister of Tyreek Burwell, an offensive lineman for the San Diego Chargers, who tweeted the following message to one of the alleged assailants when the story first came out:
That threatening message was quickly deleted.
The damage however, had already been done. The student Tyreek Burwell threatened left school, concerned for his safety.
“He’s gone, he left school,” a fellow student said.
Will the students be charged with filing a false police report if it turns out the surveillance video does indeed show a different story? Will the NFL consider looking into Burwell’s threats to a student who was not involved in the incident?
Cross-posted in altered form at the Mental Recession
