Attorneys say a Georgia man was standing his ground when he fatally shot a 17-year-old girl who was part of a crowd of people trying to run him off the road.
William Marcus Wilson, a 21-year-old black man from Sharpsburg, Georgia, has been charged with felony murder and aggravated assault in the shooting death of Haley Hutcheson, a white teen from Bellville. He was arrested after fatally shooting at a “truckload of belligerent racists” who were attempting to steer him off the road. Wilson’s attorneys say he should be held to the same legal standing as white defendants who
utilize the state’s controversial Stand Your Ground laws, his defense attorneys stated, according to NewsOne.
The incident took place on June 14. Hutcheson was inside the truck that was pursuing Wilson and his white girlfriend. The occupants in the vehicle were screaming racial slurs at the two of them. Wilson, who is legally allowed to carry the weapon he used to defend himself, should never have been charged, according to his attorneys defending him.
According to a Change.org petition, “William Marcus Wilson was out with his girlfriend at night in Sharpsburg, GA, when he was and his girlfriend were called racial slurs by a group of other teens. After Wilson and his girlfriend decided to leave, the teens followed, driving behind him and screaming racial slurs while playing music from the movie The Purge. When the other group tried to drive them off the road, William fired off a warning shot, striking Haley Hutchinson, one of the people in the truck trying to run William and his girlfriend off the road.”
“Marc Wilson and the occupant — his girlfriend — were in sheer terror that night,” Francys Johnson, a Georgia-based civil rights attorney, said during the press conference. “They expressed that to law enforcement … We think evidence will show that what Marc confronted was ‘a Black man’s worst nightmare.’”
Johnson had also stated that the Statesboro Police Department mismanaged the case from the very beginning by immediately criminalizing Wilson despite state laws that should afford him his freedom. It is the same law, Stand Your Ground, that delayed the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery‘s killers for more than two months and also the exact law that George Zimmerman used for his defense in killing Trayvon Martin in 2012.