The following is a letter received by Grand Strand Daily regarding the racial incident at Bucksport Marina property over Memorial Day Weekend. The letter is printed in full:
As a proud member of the Grand Strand community, and an equally proud advisor to the Carolina African American Heritage Foundation, to you our founder and Chair, our Directors, and our many volunteers and friends, I have the following to say about the May 28, 2017 incident which resulted in serious injury to Curtis Hendrix and also, I’m afraid, brought not a little shame down on our community.
Kudos to professional journalist Paul Gable for dragging this horrific incident out from beneath four months of official silence, if not snatching it away from what some would say resembles a coverup. And boos to the local and state so-called mainstream media for completely passing on what must be the most vicious hate crime this community has seen in a long time, if ever – to say nothing of the outrageous slap on the wrist and apparent reinstatement being enjoyed by the openly racist perpetrator, Jeffrey Weeks. One would think we were back in 19th Century post-Civil War Mississippi, and not in 21st Century South Carolina.
It’s bad enough that this creep – who we understand is from Virginia – had to crawl out from under his rock in our community, but what’s really troubling is the subsequent official fumbling and media silence.
First, the charge – misdemeanor assault – is patently ridiculous. Here we have an intentional, deliberately violent attack, openly and loudly declared by the attacker to be based on racial hatred, which injured Curtis Hendrix to the extent he was unable to work. Every element of felony assault is there – beyond law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion – and Weeks would have been charged with that anywhere else that I know of.
And has anyone but me wondered where federal law enforcement is on this case? What Weeks did was a clear violation of Title 18, Section 245 of the United States Code – the Civil Rights Act of 1968 –
