Police in a community on the southern outskirts of Cahokia, Ill., which is near East St. Louis, Mo., are in the middle of a heated community battle regarding the body of a black teenager found hanging from an old wooden bridge. They have concluded that the death was the result of suicide while community members state otherwise, that the death was a racial murder.
On the morning of April 25, 2010, Bob Shipley of the Metro East Levee District, was driving along the Prairie du Pont Creek levee. He was there to evaluate the water level of the creek but ended up finding the body of a young African American male hanging lifeless from one of the bridge supports. Shipley called 911 and authorities arrived approximately an hour later. St. Clair County officials, including the deputy coroner and police, found the victim hanging by a multicolored sheet. He was later taken to the morgue where he remained unidentified. Eventually, officials determined that the body was that of Lester Wells Jr. Cahokia Police Chief Rick Watson and his officers had to resort to looking through school yearbook photos to identify the individual.
Wells was 15 and an eighth-grader at Huffman elementary school at the time of his death. The bridge where his body was found is located less than a mile from his house and close to the police department’s firing range.
Wells’ mother, Crystal Teague, said her son would never kill himself and was excited about entering high school in the fall. She also said that the night of his disappearance, neighbors said that they saw a young man being dragged into an automobile after a confrontation with the vehicle’s occupants. After an interview with the mother, the editor of the local newspaper, Jeffry Couch of The News-Democrat, posted the story on their Web site. They had to take the article down because of the comments the article received. Couch said ” the racial comments started right away” as well “a bunch of rumors and attacks.”
The rumors allege that his death was caused by members of the Ku Klux Klan members in retaliation for the death of white teenager who was shot and killed by a black teen a few weeks earlier. Although the FBI has started a formal investigation regarding the incident and Reverend Johnny Scott of the NAACP’s St. Clair County chapter has supported the police, authorities still have not released their findings to the public. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
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