Two white men were arrested in Florida this week and accused of racial profiling after allegedly hurling a massive stone at a Black teen who was driving in the same town where Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.
“I was racially profiled while driving through my friends neighborhood,” the victim, who identified himself as JJ, wrote Wednesday on his Instagram profile, which has since been removed. “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.”
According to Seminole County records, Donald Eugene Corsi, 52, and Howard Oral Hughes, 61, were arrested Wednesday. They were first identified by social media sleuth @ThatDaneshGuy.
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Corsi faces felony charges for damage to property and launching a weapon into a vehicle. Hughes has been charged with felony property damage and a misdemeanor for battery. Both men have since been released from the Seminole jail on bond.
Howard, who was employed by a McDonald’s franchisee in Orlando, “is no longer employed by my organization,” local McDonald’s owner and operator James Gilchrist told The Daily Beast on Friday.
“We are deeply disturbed and disappointed by what we’ve seen in this video,” Gilchrist said. “This behavior goes against our values and is not tolerated.”
Howard Oral Hughes and Donald Eugene Corsi.
Seminole County Sheriff’s Office/TMXIn a video initially posted on Facebook Tuesday, a man who identified himself as JJ’s father, CJ Jones, said, “This is the video my son took while calling 911. …And as you can see they [admit] to having guns.”
In the video, one man in a blue shirt stands with his hands on his hips, watching the person holding the camera, presumed to be JJ. Another man in sunglasses walks around a white Mercedes sedan with his phone pointed toward the license plate.
“Right here! Tell me what you’ve done!” the man in sunglasses shouts.
The camera pans to the car, which has a broken window in the seat behind the driver.
“Burning out and racing through my fucking neighborhood!” the man in sunglasses yells in JJ’s face. The man in the blue shirt joins him in front of the camera.
“I’m not in your face,” the man in the blue shirt says after JJ tells him to move. “Get out of my neighborhood, you fuckwad!”
JJ asks the men if they have a gun, and one of them says he has a permit to carry.
After the two men trail JJ on the residential street, other people in the neighborhood come out to inspect what’s going on.
A woman in the street with a striped towel wrapped around her waist and a cross hanging from her neck accuses JJ of possessing a gun.
“Get out of this neighborhood!” she shouts. “You don’t belong here!”
JJ walks back to his car and films glass shards all over the backseat and a dent on the car door.
In a follow-up Facebook Live video Jones posted Tuesday, he mentioned that the incident happened in the Forest Lake neighborhood of Sanford.
“Not too far where Trayvon Martin got killed,” he wrote.
The video shows police arriving on the scene as residents stood outside their homes. Jones said that he wanted to go live “just so we have evidence, in case something happens to me out here today.”
He then turned the camera toward the house where his son was supposed to visit a friend.
“Even when I was coming into this neighborhood, I had a couple yell at me,” Jones says. “Black people cannot stay around here.”
The Daily Beast was unable to reach Corsi and Hughes on Thursday.
