CORRECTION: The Jail Report mistakenly identified the teen’s race in an earlier version. He is white. We apologize for the error, made when we misread the report.
A teen in Grovetown was charged with trespassing after a deputy caught him posting anti-police signs on a community fence, according to a sheriff’s report.
The 16-year-old teen was charged last Thursday as a juvenile and released to his brother.
Columbia County Deputy Lance Herring was traveling to Columbia Middle School last Thursday morning to conduct traffic control. According to his report, the deputy saw the juvenile hammering two paper documents on the wooden fence located at the intersection of Crown Heights Way and William Few Parkway.
The teen denied posting anything on the fence and Deputy Herring ordered the teen to lay his backpack down.
The deputy found five documents in the backpack with various messages:
* Want to get away with murder? Be a white cop.
* Darren Wilson is a murderer
* All unarmed. All innocent. All Black. All the killers were never indicted. All the Killers were white cops.
* “Police don’t ever kill innocents due to racism” (Utter Bulls**t)
* Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Dante Parker, Kendrec McDade, Armand Benet, John Crawford
The deputy contacted juvenile authorities, and the teen was charged with criminal trespass and released.
According to sheriff’s Capt. Steve Morris, the teen was not arrested for his anti-cop messages but because of how he was posting them.
“I don’t think it was so much of the posting or the words, it’s the hammering to the fence … damage to property,” Capt. Morris said, adding that the teen might have avoided arrest by taping the messages to the fence.