by David Goodman, Associated Press
Two white men accused of beating a black Michigan State trooper for dancing with a white former assistant prosecutor at a bar face a second trial starting Wednesday in heavily white Livingston County.
Local leaders say they would like nothing better than ridding themselves of the racist image that has clung to the once-rural area, now a fast-growing part of suburban Detroit’s outer fringe.
The case grows out of an April 20, 2001 attack on off-duty Trooper Arthur Williams III on the dance floor of the Metropolis Bar & Grill in Brighton.
Authorities say two cousins, angry at seeing a black man dancing with a white woman, shouted racial slurs, punched Williams and smashed his face with a bottle. He had surgery to rebuild an eye socket.
“It’s a painful thing when something like this happens,” said Lee Reeves, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Howell, the county seat. “The prosecution is taking it very seriously.”
Jasen Barker, 22, and Travis Sales, 21, were jailed on ethnic intimidation and assault charges. Their two-week trial in November ended in a deadlock. After the trial, a majority of the jurors asked to meet with Williams and expressed regret that they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict.
County Prosecutor David Morse sought a retrial, which is set to begin Wednesday before Circuit Judge Stanley Latreille. He also presided over the first trial.
“I am really pleased that our prosecutor is pursuing this,” said Howell City Councilman Steve Manor, a retired teacher and a co-founder of the racial tolerance advocacy group Livingston 2001. “This behavior will not be tolerated.”
The defendants’ attorneys declined comment Monday, saying it was too close to the trial.
Livingston County’s reputation for racism stems from its overwhelmingly white makeup, as well as to Ku Klux Klan grand dragon Robert Miles, whose farm near Howell was a hot house for white supremacist activists for decades.
Miles was convicted of conspiring to burn school buses during an integration fight in Pontiac and in the tarring and feathering of a Willow Run High School principal. Miles died in 1992.
No longer a sleepy backwater, Livingston County grew 36 percent last decade to 156,951, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. But only 722 of its residents - less than half of one percent - were black.
Manor said residents’ racial attitudes have changed, even if their racial makeup has not.
“I think there’s a great deal of acceptance of diversity and tolerance in this community,” he said.
At a preliminary examination in May, Williams, 33, testified that had he been dancing with former Livingston County Assistant Prosecutor Paulina Muzzin when he saw two white men approaching.
As they passed, Williams said, he felt someone hit him in the back.
Moments later, a bottle shattered against his face, knocking him flat on the floor, he said.
Muzzin testified that she heard Sales utter a racial slur before the attack.
Barker and Sales apparently had no idea they were dealing with a state trooper, Brighton police Chief Michael Kinaschuck said.
Barker, of Howell Township, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of assault with intent to do great bodily harm and up to two years if convicted of ethic intimidation.
Sales, of Webberville, faces up to four years if convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon, as well as the two-year ethnic intimidation charge.
The two men were being held in the Livingston County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bonds each.
The fight was far from the first at the Metropolis, Kinaschuck said, but all the previous violence had been white-on-white.
He said he took personally the attack on a fellow officer.
“Law enforcement’s like a family,” the chief said. “The fact that he was black or white didn’t matter. It was someone who was part of your family.”