Last week, 66-year-old Timothy Caughman was stabbed to death by James Harris Jackson, a 28-year-old Baltimore native who traveled to New York City expressly for the purpose of killing black people. Now Jackson is being charged with murder as terrorism.
According to CNN, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. delivered this announcement on Monday.
“James Jackson prowled the streets of New York for three days in search of a black person to assassinate in order to launch a campaign of terrorism against our Manhattan community and the values we celebrate,” he said.
Jackson told police that Caughman’s murder had served as “practice” for other, more visible killings in locations like Times Square. He selected Caughman at random, skin color his only criteria, and stabbed him repeatedly in public.
In addition to being charged with murder as terrorism in the first and second degrees, Jackson is also charged with murder in the second degree as a hate crime, as well as with three counts of criminal possession of a weapon.
Meanwhile, the White House has been conspicuously silent regarding this racially-motivated brutality. When press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about Caughman’s murder on Monday, he demurred, providing only an elliptical response that did not refer to a specific case.
“Hate crimes and anti-Semitic crimes of any nature should be called out in the most reprehensible way,” Spicer said. “There is no room for that in our country.”
Donald Trump, who makes a practice of “calling out” behavior of which he disapproves—Twitter, we know, is his preferred medium—has offered no statement of his own.