A Killing at Donkey Creek

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a basketball legend on the Quinault Nation reservation, was 20 when he was mowed down by a white man in a pickup truck. The decision not to charge a hate crime, and recent talk of a plea deal, has re-opened ancient wounds.

by Rahima Nasa April 26, 5 a.m. EDT

The submissions from Native Americans have come into ProPublica’s Documenting Hate database with regularity: In Reno, Nevada, a truck was driven into a group of Native people protesting Columbus Day, injuring one; a Navajo woman in Flagstaff, Arizona, reported being told, “Go back to where you came from” by a driver who pulled up to her at a bus stop. A Sioux woman in Winterset, Iowa, reported that she was called a “prairie nigger” on Facebook.

An entry from late last May, though, was of another order: a news account of a killing in Grays Harbor County in Washington.

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, 20, and a member of the Quinault Indian Nation, had been crushed under the wheels of a pickup truck at a local campground. Another member of the tribe had been gravely injured as well. And a white man, James Walker, had been arrested and charged with having intentionally run over the two men after Walker admitted to flooring his gas pedal. The authorities claimed Walker backed over the men, then drove forward, grinding them into the ground a second time.

The leaders of the Quinault Nation had quickly issued a statement alleging that Walker and or others in his truck had used anti-Native slurs during the fatal incident. A handful of local news organizations published early accounts reflecting the concern that the killing amounted to a hate crime.

But in the year since then, the case has faded from public view, locally and nationally. It caused barely a ripple when prosecutors chose not to charge Walker with a hate crime, saying there were conflicting accounts of his possible motivations, and about who had said what, if anything, during the incident. Walker, who pleaded innocent at his May 2017 arraignment, has maintained he could not have committed a hate crime against Natives because he is part Cherokee himself.

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-killing-at-donkey-creek


As a person of Cherokee ancestry, I am not a "river n*****".......................