A dozen protestors marched Wednesday outside the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, demanding prosecutors drop all charges against the so-called “MTA 9,” the black teenagers accused of brutally beating a white woman on a Baltimore City bus in December.
“No grown person should be spitting on kids,” shouted Quentin Whaley Sr., 54, the father of one of the accused teens, who held a sign that read: “Drop all charges against the MTA 9.”
“If someone spit in your face, what would you do?” he asked. “This isn?t 1857. This is 2008. We won?t be chattel property.”
The protest, organized by the Baltimore branch of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, came a day before the teens are scheduled to stand trial today on charges they beat Sarah Kreager, 26, her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, 30, and the No. 27 route bus driver Dec. 4 as they were riding home from Robert Poole Middle School in Hampden.
Kreager suffered two broken bones in her left eye socket during the attack, police said. Two seats and the bus?s rear window were destroyed, prosecutors said.
Kreager?s swollen black eye quickly became a symbol nationally of the apparent randomness of urban crime, but the students maintained that Kreager started the altercation by spitting on and punching them while Ennis yelled racial slurs and threatened to stab them. One student filed counter assault charges against Kreager, but prosecutors quickly dropped that case.
“We?re tired of the word of a white person being considered more credible than the statements of a black person,” said Nnamdi Lumumba, the Uhuru Movement local president.
Lumumba said he organized the protest because city officials and the media have made Kreager into “the poster child for racial abuse” while ignoring her “long history of violence, drug dealing and abuse.”
Kreager is currently charged with attempted drug distribution and possession in Baltimore City. She accused Ennis of domestic violence in 2006, court records show.
“The children reported she walked on the bus with her eye already bruised and damaged,” Lumumba said. “Yet it is the children who get dragged through the mud as the people who caused the damage to her face.”
At the protest, David Johnson, an activist with the Black Community Forum Think Tank, said Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon and other city leaders are to blame for what he says is preferential treatment authorities give to white residents over black residents.
“We are witnessing a rewhitening of the city of Baltimore,” he said.
Though they are not commenting on the case, prosecutors plan to pursue charges against only seven of the nine students Friday, because two of the cases lack the evidence to proceed.
At an earlier court hearing, prosecutor Dawn Jones said the teens kicked and punched Kreager as she fell into a gutter near the bus. She described their attack on Kreager as “unprovoked.”
Kreager recently asked a Baltimore attorney to investigate her case to see if she had grounds for a lawsuit against the Maryland Transit Administration, which runs buses throughout the state, including the No. 27 bus where the altercation took place.
The disputed accounts of the assault could have been cleared up by film taken from the video camera on the bus, but sources say that camera wasn?t working at the time of incident.
