As is almost always the case, a Black man commits a crime and it’s automatically assumed to be the White man’s fault. Blame Whitey!
After Omar Thornton (pictured at right with his girlfriend) murdered eight people at Hartford Distributors in Connecticut before turning his gun on himself, the major media quickly began looking for excuses to explain the heinous crime.
Thornton, who was black, opened fire on coworkers on August 3 after a meeting at which officials of the beer distributorship gave him the choice to resign or be fired for theft. Thornton signed the letter. Then he opened fire.
Yet the major media quickly injected the question of whether “racists” at the company were torturing Thornton, sending him into a justifiable rage. As Steve Sailer at VDare.com put it, “Did The Hartford Massacre Victims Have It Coming?”
The Christian Science Monitor ran this headline over a follow-up story about the case: “Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.” The CBS News website carried this one: “I Killed The Five Racists.” A headline in the New York Daily News ran thusly: “Kristi Hannah, girlfriend of Omar Thornton, recalls gunman’s goodbye, racism concerns.”
Those stories showcased Thornton’s girlfriend and family expanding upon that theme. They accused the company of permitting employees to conduct an unremitting campaign of racial harassment. Reported the Monitor, “Reports indicate that, to Thornton at least, race was an issue at Hartford Distributors. He told friends and relatives that coworkers had scrawled racist epithets on a bathroom wall and a hung a stick-figure effigy in a miniature noose.”
According to the New York Times, the girlfriend, Kristin Hannah claims
Mr. Thornton called her from the men’s room at the plant to let her hear his boss and a colleague he identified as a union representative say they were going to get rid of him, using a racial slur. Ms. Hannah said she could hear the comments clearly because of how they echoed in the bathroom. She said that even though Mr. Thornton brought the case to his union representative several times, the union never followed up.
“I know they pushed them; they did this to him,” Hannah told the Times. “I know what was said, and I know it was very hurtful, and I know it bothered him a lot.” The Times then sought Hannah’s 13-year-old brother’s opinion: “Omar was a great guy,” Ryan said. “This thing was brought on by people who don’t treat each other as equals.”
Hannah told the New York Daily News that “every one of [the victims] was a person I heard Omar mention. He didn’t go around randomly shooting people. He knew these were the people who harassed him.”
As well, she said, he “was very sensitive about his race. If you called him a n—-r, he would go off. But he kept it inside. He kept it all bottled up.”