The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

DOA on the Road to Social Justice

Posted on | October 24, 2024 | No Comments

Samantha Hamer

In 2019, faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville held a workshop entitled, “Let’s Talk About Privilege.” Among the attendees was Samantha Hamer, a school social worker who graduated from UW-Platteville in 2016. After the workshop, Hamer said:

“Racism and white supremacy need to be dismantled everywhere, including Platteville. White people built these systems and still benefit from them today. We must acknowledge our wrongs and biases and realize that no white person is exempt from being a part of, and upholding, racism. Reparations on a large scale are owed and need to happen now. All white people need to call out racism and all of its forms every single time. We need to create action, large-scale and in our daily lives, to dismantle racism and white supremacy.”

Well, all-righty, then. Whenever I encounter someone so vehement in their beliefs, my instinct is to get as far away from them as fast as I can, without attracting their attention. Crazy People Are Dangerous, as I have often said, and when somebody gets so excited about “white supremacy” — whether they’re for or against it, I’ll add — you probably don’t want to be in their vicinity. That rant from Hamer was a red flag. The phrase emotionally unbalanced perhaps best describes such people.

Fast forward to June 2020 when, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, a #BlackLivesMatter protest gathered near the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison. Democratic State Sen. Tim Carpenter was recording video of the protest when he was attacked by two masked women:

The attack left Carpenter with a broken nose and a concussion. The irony is that Carpenter is a progressive gay man who supported the protests, but the BLM radicals and their “mostly peaceful” crowds were out to cause mayhem that night, and Carpenter was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After photos of the two attackers were made public, they were arrested in July 2020: Hamer, then 26, and Kerida O’Reilly, 33.

Hamer was allowed to plead no contest to “a disorderly conduct civil law violation, which is not a criminal charge,” the New York Times said in reporting the October 2021 verdict in O’Reilly’s trial, at which a Dane County jury acquitted her. No consequences — that’s what progressives mean by “social justice.” Do whatever the hell you want, and who cares about silly things like laws and rules? But of course, there are consequences to this “no consequences” lifestyle, as two men and a teenage girl from Wisconsin discovered a few years later.

It was 9 p.m. on New Year’s Day — January 1, 2024 — when a police sergeant patrolling in the Madison suburb of Monona noticed an SUV driving erratically. Sgt. Adam Nachreiner “was at the intersection of St. Teresa Terrace and Monona Dr., and as he turned onto Monona Dr. he observed a SUV traveling on Monona Dr. turn abruptly from the far left lane to the right lane at Monona Drive and Nichols Rd. before turning right on Nichols Rd.”:

The officer believed the vehicle may be trying to avoid him. As the officer turned onto Nichols Rd. to attempt to run a data check the SUV turned into a parking lot. The officer followed the SUV into the parking lot. The SUV didn’t park but instead turned around and accelerated past the officer and back onto Nichols Rd. The officer turned his squad around and activated his lights and siren in an attempt to stop the SUV.

This seems obvious enough, yes? As soon as the SUV driver sees the cop car, he switches lanes suddenly and makes a right turn. A police sergeant is generally someone with years of experience, and this move caught his attention, so he decides to go get a look at the license plate. Is the vehicle stolen? Is the driver got outstanding warrants? There’s no way of knowing until you check it out, and that’s what Sgt. Nachreiner was doing. (Not to spoil a surprise ending, but the cop’s hunch was right.)

The SUV took off at high speed, racing through downtown Monona at about 80 mph, and then southward on Agriculture Drive toward Femrite Drive, where the SUV driver turned right — heading west, toward Madison — but there was “a fully marked Madison Police Department squad” parked there, waiting on him, so the SUV made a U-turn and headed west. Femrite Drive is mostly a straightaway here, and now the SUV was pushing 100 mph. A Dane County Sheriff’s deputy was up ahead, setting up “stop sticks,” hoping to puncture the SUV’s tires and thus bring the pursuit to a halt, but this attempt proved unsuccessful. The SUV blasted through a stop sign, ran off the road on the left side, and smashed into a tree, exploding in a fireball:

 

All three occupants died in the crash:

  • Rashad Lamar Nelson, 30, from Madison
  • Aaron Javon Willis, 30, from Madison
  • Aajayah Monai Ray, 19, from Sun Prairie

Now, as I said, Sgt. Nachreiner was correct in his suspicions about the SUV. People don’t flee the cops at 100 mph for no reason, but in the immediate aftermath of this fatal crash, before the investigation was complete and before the police video or any other relevant information could be released, there was a lot of blame-the-cops rhetoric: “‘I want justice’: Mother of Monona Police chase victim says her daughter’s death was senseless,” was the headline at the WISC-TV website.

Aajayah Ray

That’s a mug shot from the Dane County jail, after Aajayah Ray was arrested in January 2023, about a year before the fatal crash. The website from which I got that mug shot doesn’t say what the charges were, but did you happen to notice that Aajayah Ray had a tattoo on her neck? Maybe lots of teenage girls in Wisconsin have neck tattoos nowadays, and maybe that Dane County arrest was for some kind of trivial misdemeanor, but I just wanted readers to consider the possibility that maybe Aajayah Ray was involved in something illegal that was happening in that SUV in downtown Minona. However, I didn’t know anything about these people when I clicked on that YouTube video. Because I watch a lot of police videos, the YouTube algorithm just randomly puts them into my feed, which is how I stumbled onto this story Wednesday night.

My curiosity inspired me to do a bit of Google searching. This led me to a GoFundMe page soliciting contributions for Rashad Lamar Nelson’s memorial fund which included a shocking statement: “Rashad and Aajayah and Aaron were murdered in a sundown town.”

What the actual hell is this? For anyone unfamiliar with the term, “sundown town” refers to “all-white municipalities or neighborhoods” that practiced “a form of racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation or violence. They were most prevalent before the 1950s. The term came into use because of signs that directed ‘colored people’ to leave town by sundown” (via Wikipedia). There is zero evidence that Monona, Wisconsin, was ever a “sundown town,” but in 2024? Are you kidding me? But the assertion that the three people who died in that crash were “murdered” is even more preposterous. The state Division of Criminal Investigation did their job, and in May, the Dane County District Attorney found there were no grounds for any criminal charge against the law enforcement personnel involved. The district attorney’s statement includes this:

None of the occupants appeared to be wearing seat belts at the time of the SUV impacting the tree. A later search of the vehicle produced two firearms; one of which was listed as stolen. There was also marijuana found in the vehicle. Toxicology of the driver of the SUV indicated the presence of Delta-9/THC and its metabolites, Methamphetamine, and Promethazine.

Two guns, one of which was stolen. The driver had THC (i.e., marijuana) and meth in his system, but what about Promethazine? That’s an antihistamine found in certain cough syrups, often used to make the intoxicating beverage known as “lean” or “purple drank.”

So, yeah, Sgt. Nachreiner’s hunch was right on target: Two guys from Madison and a teenage girl from Sun Prairie just rolling around town with guns and drugs in the car, maybe messed up on “purple drank” — why were they even in Monona to begin with? Did any journalist ask Aajayah Ray’s mother that question? But never mind that. Would you care to guess who was responsible for that GoFundMe page that said “Rashad and Aajayah and Aaron were murdered in a sundown town”?

Samantha Hamer.

At the time that Rashad was rolling around Monona in a vehicle full of felonies, Samantha Hamer was nine months pregnant with Rashad’s baby, who was born three days after Rashad was DOA because he crashed into a tree at 100 mph running from the cops. “Racism and white supremacy need to be dismantled everywhere,” she said, but instead what got dismantled was that SUV. Perhaps there is some kind of useful life lesson to be learned here. Like, avoid teenage girls with criminal records and neck tattoos? Or maybe, high-speed driving and “purple drank” are a bad combination? But I think there are more serious lessons to be learned, about the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, rather than embracing a victim mentality that turns your life into an eternal hunt for scapegoats you can blame for your problems.

And, yeah, stay away from crazy people. They’re dangerous.



 

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Category: Crime, Racism, Wisconsin

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