Hate Crime Charged in Defacing of Statue
Source: The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/, August 24th 2000
Hate Crime Charged In Defacing of Statue
By Darragh Johnson,Washington Post Staff Writer
Annapolis police have arrested a man and charged him with hate crimes in connection with the desecration of a statue of renowned black legislator Aris T. Allen.
John Mathias Exner Jr., 36, was charged with two counts of racial harassment and one count of destruction of property. Police served an arrest warrant at his home in Crownsville Tuesday night.
Police were following a tip received this month, when two friends of Exner’s told police that he had been bragging about the crime, Officer Hal Dalton said. Exner, who was not being held in jail, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
On July 4, a white pillowcase was found over the Allen statue’s head with cutouts for the eyes and a red smiley face painted on the top. Confederate flags were duct-taped to the statue’s hands.
First elected in 1966, Allen had been the first African American to represent Anne Arundel County in the legislature and the first black physician to hold admitting privileges at Anne Arundel Medical Center. He died in 1991, not long after starting a new term as a Republican member of the House of Delegates.
Anne Arundel NAACP President Gerald Stansbury cautioned that “every man is innocent until proven guilty,” but he and others in the county’s African American community said that the police’s keeping the case alive is good news. “It sends a message that this community takes these crimes seriously,” he said.
Carl Snowden, an aide to County Executive Janet S. Owens (D) and a leader in the African American community, said he found the news especially reassuring because this is the first arrest made in connection with an Anne Arundel hate crime.
He cited the 1998 defacing of a synagogue with antisemitic graffiti and that same year the vandalizing with Ku Klux Klan signs and other racist graffiti of an African American woman’s beauty salon in South Anne Arundel County. In September 1998, the Aris T. Allen statue was found with a noose around its neck. No arrests were made in those cases.
Also, no arrests have been made in connection with the death threat laced with racial slurs received in March by Anne Arundel School Superintendent Carol S. Parham.
