Home / Full timeline / Christopher Wilson, a Jamaican immigrant from New York City, is kidnapped, set on fire and left for dead by white racists.
Christopher Wilson, a Jamaican immigrant from New York City, is kidnapped, set on fire and left for dead by white racists.
1993 (Jan 1)
A Black man vacationing near Tampa, Florida, was kidnapped by three white men, robbed, drenched with gasoline, and set on fire. His attackers left behind a misspelled note reading, "One les nigger, one more to go. KKK." Thirty-one-year-old Christopher Wilson, a Jamaican immigrant from New York City, had gone out early New Year's morning to buy a newspaper. As he stopped at a shopping center, he was confronted by three men and forced at gunpoint to drive to a remote area. There he was taunted with racial slurs, assaulted, and left for dead. But he managed to make his way to a nearby home where a resident hosed him down with water. When police arrived, Wilson was in so much pain that he begged them to shoot him. Although he suffered severe burns over forty percent of his body, Wilson survived and was able to identify one of the men police later arrested, twenty-six-year-old Mark Kohut. Also arrested were Charles Rourk, age thirty-three, and Jeff Ray Pellett, age seventeen. Authorities described all three men as drifters who had met each other through a day-labor service. They were charged with carjacking (a federal crime), attempted murder, robbery, and kidnapping, for which they faced up to twenty-five years in prison. And since the case was officially classified as a hate crime because the attackers had referred to race as a motive, they faced even more jail time for violating Wilson's civil rights.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.