SANFORD, Fla. — Two white men were charged after the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said they damaged a Black teen's car in an encounter that the teen's family has suggested may have had racial undertones. One of the men was then accused of hitting the teen's white passenger with a traffic cone.
Investigators say it happened a little before 6 p.m. Tuesday on Maple Glen Place in Sanford.
According to a law enforcement affidavit, a Black 16-year-old driver was with a white 15-year-old front-seat passenger in a Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan when two white men walked up making threats toward them.
Investigators say one of the men hit the car with an orange traffic cone, causing damage. The other man, authorities say, threw a rock – shattering a window.
When the teens got out of the car, an affidavit says the man with the traffic cone hit the 15-year-old in the abdomen.
Authorities say they identified the attackers as 61-year-old Howard Hughes and 52-year-old Donald Corsi – who are neighbors on the street where the incident happened.
Hughes was charged with criminal mischief and battery. Corsi was charged with criminal mischief and throwing a "missile," which authorities indicate was the rock in this case.
Both men were booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Sanford.
Civil Rights Attorney Ben Crump tweeted video appearing to have been recorded after the car window was shattered but before law enforcement arrived.
In it, one of the men appears to accuse the 16-year-old of street racing.
"Get out of my neighborhood," the other man tells the teen.
A woman can be heard yelling for the teens to get out of the neighborhood and adding "you don't belong here..."
Online, some social media users have indicated the men racially profiled the young driver. And, the teen driver seems to agree.
“If I just were a white person driving through that neighborhood, I wouldn’t have been treated the way I was treated,” 16-year-old Jermaine Jones, the teen driver, told The Post in an interview that was conducted with his father's permission.
Jones told CBS affiliate WKMG he began recording the video, which was shared by Crump, because he was in fear for his life.
“It didn’t even feel real,” Jones told WKMG. “I actually had to take my shirt off because I had glass all over. The backseat, there’s glass everywhere. My friend had glass all over him too.”
According to WKMG, Jones admitted the confrontation began after he sped through the gated neighborhood on the way to his friend's home. The CBS affiliate said the sheriff's office was reviewing surveillance video that appeared to show Jones peel out with a passenger hanging out the window before the altercation took place.
Still, the teen's mom suggested to WKMG that her son was targeted.
“There are kids, I was told, who speed through that neighborhood all the time, but they are not of his color," mother Niko Jones told the CBS station. "So I’m pretty sure that all of this happened because my son is Black."
