Jury to decide if college student's killing was hate crime
UPPER MARLBORO, Md. (AP) — Three friends were waiting at a bus stop on the University of Maryland’s campus around 3 a.m. on a Saturday when a stranger approached them, screaming.
"Step left, step left if you know what's best for you," the 22-year-old white man told the friends, according to police.
"No," one of the friends, a black man, said before the white man plunged a knife into his chest.
Police arrested Sean Urbanski at the bus stop, 50 feet from where 23-year-old Richard Collins III, was dying. After fatally stabbing Collins, Urbanski folded the knife, slipped it into his pocket and sat down on a bench until police arrived, a prosecutor has said.
When Urbanski’s murder trial starts this week, Prince George’s County prosecutors will argue Collins’ killing was a hate crime carried out by a man biased against black people. Urbanski liked a Facebook group called "Alt-Reich: Nation" and saved at least six photographs of racist memes on his phone, according to prosecutors.
Defense attorneys say there is no evidence of a racist motive for what occurred at the bus stop that night in May 2017. Witnesses told police that Urbanski was drunk and screaming incoherently when he approached the friends, one of his lawyers has said.
The killing coincided with a surge in hate on U.S. college campuses. Reports of white supremacists posting fliers and other propaganda on campuses more than tripled in 2017, according to a tally by the Anti-Defamation League. In August 2017, torch-toting white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia's campus on the eve of a rally that led to violent clashes and bloodshed.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it’s “unfortunate” that...