A black man who feared for his life called the police earlier this month after being threatened. When the police arrived, it was the black man who was arrested, not the white people who threatened to kill him.
According to BuzzFeed News, Leon McCray Sr. called the police on June 1 after a group of white people threatened to kill him.
According to the report: “McCray Sr. detailed the June 1 incident in a sermon at his church that was posted on YouTube last week. McCray told his congregation that he was driving to a property he owned in Edinburg, Virginia, when he saw two people who didn’t live there dragging a refrigerator to a dumpster at his apartment building. When he asked them to leave because they were trespassing, he said that they started threatening him and brought three other people who circled around him. “They were telling me that my black life and black lives matter stuff — that they don’t give a darn about that stuff in this county and they could care less and ‘We will kill you,'” McCray said.”
According to McCray, he pulled out his licensed concealed gun after the group had threatened his life and proceeded to call 911 for assistance.
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Arriving at the scene, officers went directly to McCray and told him to hand over his gun before talking to the group of five people who had allegedly threatened him.
But McCray said that the deputies never let him give them his story. “They came back to me and said, ‘We have to arrest you for brandishing a firearm,'” McCray said.
“They put me in handcuffs,” McCray said.
The pastor said that when deputies placed him in the car, the five people who’d been threatening him waved at the vehicle and kept yelling “racial epithets” at the car.
According to Shenandoah County Sheriff Timothy Carter, who spoke with WUSA 9, he was upset at the deputies who took care of the incident.
“Mr. McCray was defending himself,” he said. “I believe Mr. McCray.”
In a post on the county sheriff’s Facebook page, Carter wrote that he had met with McCray personally on June 3 and had apologized for his arrest. “If I were faced with similar circumstances, I would have probably done the same thing,” the sheriff wrote.
The five people who allegedly assaulted McCray have now been charged with various crimes including trespassing, assault, hate crime assault, and battery.
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