Just days before a domestic terrorist entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and shot 11 worshipers dead, a white man gunned down two elderly African-American customers at a Kentucky grocery store Wednesday in what many are calling a hate crime. Fifty-one-year-old Gregory Bush opened fire and killed Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones at a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, shortly after trying to enter a predominantly black church. Bush reportedly then told an armed bystander that “whites don’t kill whites.” As the community mourns, we speak with Kentucky Rep. Attica Scott and Reverend Vincent James, chief of community building for the city of Louisville and pastor of Elim Baptist Church.
TRANSCRIPT
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show looking at the hate-fueled crimes that have swept the nation in the past week. Eleven worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh were killed Saturday in what has been described as the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history. The attack came just one day after a Trump supporter in Florida named Cesar Sayoc was arrested and charged with mailing bombs to more than a dozen of the president’s prominent critics, including the Clintons, the Obamas and George Soros. Law enforcement officers now say Sayoc had a list of over 100 targets.
But there was a third hate-fueled crime that received far less coverage last week: the murder of two elderly African-American customers at a Kentucky grocery store on Wednesday. Gregory Bush, a 51-year-old white man, opened fire and killed Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones at a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, outside Louisville, after unsuccessfully trying to enter a predominantly black church. Now the community is demanding justice for what the Louisville [sic] chief of police has called a hate crime.
AMY GOODMAN: Gregory Bush was captured on a surveillance camera trying to force open the doors of the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown for several minutes…