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(Editor’s note: Colin Flaherty has done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse. WND features these reports to counterbalance the virtual blackout by the rest of the media due to their concerns that reporting such incidents would be inflammatory or even racist. WND considers it racist not to report racial abuse solely because of the skin color of the perpetrators or victims.) Videos linked or embedded may contain foul language and violence.
Sometimes reporters just cannot ignore black mob violence: Especially when they are the victims.
The latest example comes from Providence, R.I. Local newshound Abbey Niezgoda and her photographer were dutifully asking a mother what she thought about the alleged shooter of her daughter turning himself in.
Melissa Lawrence did not like the question. She screamed and threw a rock at the cameraman’s head, hitting his arm as he tried to shield his face. All on video.
“Are you going to throw rocks?” asked Abbey with a remarkably calm demeanor.
The woman answered by running up the stairs to get a baseball bat while at least two other people watched.
“Get away from me,” she yelled at the reporters upon her return, who were standing in the street.
But before they had a chance to leave, Lawrence released her hounds, instructing them to attack. Two pit bulls came flying out of the fenced yard, straight at the cameraman. Not finding fair game there, they attacked Abbey while she ran down the street.
During the attack, the cameraman kept a nice steady shot of the action as the dogs bit Abbey on the legs and forearm.
Eventually, Abbey found shelter in a nearby yard. Lawrence retrieved her pit bulls.
“Get the **** away from my house,” shouted Ms. Lawrence. “You dumb white b****. Put that on the news.”
Lawrence was arrested the following day and charged with felony assault.
Abbey’s encounter with the pit bull may bring her some viral Internet fame, but precious little sympathy in Providence:
“I believe the woman was well within her right to sic dogs on them,” said David Aaron on Facebook.
“Pit bulls vs paparazzi,” said Bertram Wallace in the comments section of the Providence Journal. “Pit bulls 1 paparazzi 0.”
The dogs are still at large.
This is hardly the first time that local TV news reporters have been under assault from black mobs. In Oakland, Calif., last November, Anne Makovec was filing a story about Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for a tax hike when five black men “rushed up and grabbed a $6000 camera.” Live.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “One of the assailants punched (the cameraman) in the mouth before the group fled in a Mercedes-Benz, which apparently was accompanied by a Lexus.”
This was just one in a series of almost a dozen attacks and thefts of TV news equipment in the San Francisco Bay Area within a year.
In April 2012, in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Ashley Taylor was doing a live remote from the boardwalk about crime in that upscale beach town when five black people approached her. One of them pushed her down, grabbed her mike and shouted at the camera: “I am that n****.”
Justin Moore was later arrested for assault.
In 2011, outside of an IHOP restaurant in Natoma, the Sacramento Bee reported a “mob of two dozen angry mourners charged and attacked a news crew Sunday afternoon that was reporting on the killing of a 27-year-old man early in the morning.”
The man was killed in a late-night episode of black mob violence at the IHOP. The Bee may have neglected to mention the reporters were victims of a black mob as well, but the video was quite clear.
The reporter thought he was offering friends of the victim a chance to remember their fallen comrade. Instead, they attacked him. On video.
“Whatch you gonna do,” yelled one of the attackers as they assaulted the reporter and camerawoman.
What reporter John Lobertini tried to do was explain to them that he was one of the good guys. That just got them angry, so they beat him up some more.
If the video seemed a bit unsteady, that is because the crowd was pulling the camerawoman down to the ground by her hair and kicking her in the face. Repeatedly.
“They surrounded her and started kicking her,” said Lobertini. “I’ve been around this mob mentality before so I immediately knew what was happening. I was able to hold them off long enough so that she could get up.”
Many still remember the black mob attack last year on two reporters from the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. At first police said it was a racial crime, perhaps because all of the 50 to 100 attackers were black. And at least one said the violence had something to do with revenge for the recent killing of Trayvon Martin.
But the Virginian-Pilot refused to do a story on it for two weeks.
After getting ambushed by Jesse Watters of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Dennis Finley, the editor of the Virginian-Pilot, reluctantly said: “The story has been blown out of proportion, and that’s not to diminish the fact that I had two reporters who got beaten. But what it amounts to is a street altercation, not a mob attack. No evidence that it was a racial attack.”
At least there were no pit bulls.
See the Big List of black mob violence.
