Remel Newson, a 20-year-old Queens, N.Y., man, was angry after a jury in Sanford, Fla., on July 13 found Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager. Newson took to Facebook to air his grievances, posting a status update about how blacks cannot get justice, according to WNYC. He used the hashtag “#killall whites” and wrote, “let’s kill cops nd neighborhood watcher [sic].”
Read the full post below (via Gothamist):
BLAC N****S CNT GET NO TYPE OF JUSTICE FUCCIN WIT DESE CRACCER’S #KILLALL WHITES DATS DA TYPE OF S**T I’M ON F**K DIS BEEF S**T LET’S KILL COPS ND NEIGHBO RHOOD WATCHER #FACTS DAT
A New York Police Department officer monitoring Facebook saw the post on July 17. Hours later, the Queens man was arrested for “making a terroristic threat,” a felony, according to WNYC. He was later charged with unlawful possession of marijuana.
Following the arrest, Newson admitted to police he “f**ked up” and made a “stupid mistake,” according to DNAinfo New York. However, his lawyer, Tasha Lloyd-Garcia, claims her client copied and pasted the “terroristic” post from another person’s profile onto his. She is “disturbed” over how the NYPD obtained a search warrant based solely off the posts.
“It doesn’t seem like it would meet the standard for probable cause to get a search warrant,” she told DNAinfo. “There’s no common scheme or plans to carry anything out.”
Arrests over Facebook posts are not unheard of. In February, Texas teen Justin Carter was jailed after he made a sarcastic threat in a Facebook comment to “shoot up a school full of kids and eat their … hearts” while arguing with a friend over a video game. A woman from Canada saw the post and alerted authorities. Carter was taken into custody and charged with making a terroristic threat. On July 11, he was freed on $500,000 bail after nearly six months in jail.