BRUNSWICK, Ga. – NAACP president Dr. John Perry II said the most disturbing and damning thing that has transpired in the aftermath of the gruesome shooting death of Sherry West’s infant baby is this: the two black teens being held in jail have already been figuratively tried and convicted of the murder before they have even gone to trial.
Perry, the senior pastor at Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in the small town on the southeastern tip of Georgia, and other community leaders believe the overwhelming majority of the white residents in Brusnwick, save a few exceptions, have already convicted the two black teens — De’Marquise Kareem Elkins, 17, and Dominique Lang, 15 — in the court of public opinion, despite conflicting and murky evidence and the singular testimony of a mentally disturbed woman.
According to the Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville, Fla., defense attorney Kevin Gough said the family of the two black teens fear for their own safety. Gough “said the fear is understandable considering there have been calls on the Internet for lynching Elkins. He said there was a Facebook page called ‘Execute De’Marquise Elkins.’”
“Community-wise, there were too many people who were ready to write these two young men off as the ones who committed this particular deed,” said Perry, who moved to Brunswick six years ago from Jacksonville, Fla., about an hour south.
“I think it goes back to something that we say goes on a lot, the profiling that we do,” Perry continues. “It was too easy for them to believe that two young black males were capable of doing this before having a trial. And in America, our legal system claims that you’re innocent until proven guilty. But in this community, a lot of people wrote them off as being guilty, which is a travesty in and of itself, because now it is looking like there is a strong possibility that they are not guilty.”
Perry is referring to the investigative findings from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. The GBI revealed to the media that gun residue was found on the hands of both the parents of infant Antonio Santiago, Sherry West and Louis Santiago. And since, as Perry said, there was no gun residue found on the two teenage boys, there have been rumblings going on.
“The question being raised by the minority community is ‘why are they still in jail? If they have this kind of information, then why are they still locked up?’”
Worse than that, the two teens are facing trial for first-degree murder, a capital murder case, in suburban Atlanta (Marrietta, Ga.) on Aug. 19 some 400 miles away from Brunswick. By law, the two teens cannot get the death penalty if convicted because they are under 18 years of age.
“And now evidence is coming out about gun residue, about it being on the hands of the mother and the father, who claims he was nowhere to be found. So questions are now being raised that begin to make (some) people think that ‘are they really innocent?’ Perry ponders. “And you have to raise the question that ‘what if we never got to the point of never discovering that they had no gun residue on their hands?’ but the mother and father of the deceased child did (have gun residue on their hands).”
Perry adds that everyone in Brunswick was horrified and mortified by this heinous act, blacks and whites alike.
“One of the great injustices of this case is that it paints this community in a way that it isn’t. The act was so gruesome that those who were introduced to this city view it in light of that act. The powers that be are, of course, concerned about that act, how that impacts tourism, how it affects the image of the community,” Perry surmised.
“So you have that on one end. On the other end, what I saw was a community that was devastated by that act, that someone could literally take the life of a baby in that fashion.”
