Discussion: Black GA Couple Uses Housing Law To Sue Neighbor Over Racist Slurs, Threats

They look like decent people, that I sure wouldn’t mind having as neighbors in my neighborhood.

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Bwaks? Oh, nevermind.

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Though it’s far more probable having resided in Gainesville GA his entire life.
(I attended high school about 40mi from Gainesville.)

jw1

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But…he seems nice.

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White Supremacy. On full display.

Fox News: We Distort. You Deride.

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I am sure Ms. VonHoist is never bored when you are around. Thanks for the smiles even in a story that makes me ill. If only people in this country could learn to accept and embrace our differences it would allow the best to come through all of us. Oh but I guess I can dream can’t I?

As I said below, if only we could embrace our differences, the best in all of us would show through but I do tend to day dream sometimes.

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Go for it! No one should have to live under those circumstances. If you don’t like someone then don’t talk to them and ignore them. What this guy did was just plain hate and bigotry and he should have been prosecuted for hate crimes.

After his probation officer said Turner continued to insult the Bonds family, the judge ordered him not to drink or possess any alcohol, to submit to random alcohol testing, to allow police to enter his home randomly to make sure there were no guns and to have no contact with the Bonds family, court records show.

Don’t know if this was added after your post or not, but no he wasn’t allowed to have guns anymore.

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This man should have been forced to live in an assisted living situation once it was determined he couldn’t control himself and that he was a violent threat to others. I sincerely wish the Bonds family all the best.

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I worked with many folks who were mentally ill, granted many years ago. Ironically, part of that time I worked to provide legal services to poor people in Gainesville. In fact metal illness and traumatic brain injuries can change a person’s entire personality and remove behavioral inhibitions. Without minimizing the threats felt by this family, a large part of the problem seems to be how we (don’t) care for the mentally ill/disabled. Note that this man had numerous run ins with co-workers and other members of the public - and I bet all those run ins were not based on racial slurs. Should he have guns? Hell no. Should the neighbors have to be frightened? Hell no. But my experience leads me to have empathy for a man who is clearly damaged and lives in a system that doesn’t deal with such folks (except through the criminal system) until there is a tragedy.

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Well based on well documented incidents that have occurred just this year, I have to say that if the skin colors were reversed, the one with the darker skin would be occupying a 6 foot deep hole permanently. And, the method of qualifying that person for that occupancy would involve a gun owned by a policeman. I guess I should just view this as a half full glass?

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And, 100% of the Iowa Governors are mentally ill.

Suppose they didn’t look like decent people. Should your perception of how they look have any effect on your accepting them as neighbors? That is one of the major problems we are still struggling with. Far too many of us equate physical appearance to whether or not someone is a decent person, a bad guy, a troublemaker, etc. It is a problem for each of us individually to work on solving.

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After numerous confrontations with co-workers and the public, Turner was fired Oct. 23.

Too late.

So Fox spins the story to make it seem that the fair housing act is the problem or “why are these uppity people clogging up the courts costing the taxpayer money”.

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I never understood why, if you don’t like your neighbors, you need to bother and insult them. If the law says this is wrong, then I hope he has to pay.

Thanks, BeattyCat, I missed that. Still wondering how he had a weapon in the first place, but I guess if your rationality suffers after you have made a gun purchase then there’s not much the police can do about it until you start to menace people.

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Maybe that “group of friends” that ostensibly looks out for Turner and helps him with independent living should have helped him move to another house or to supervised living. Because, as other people point out, people with traumatic brain injury should be entirely reliant on friends and family to get the help they need, rather than there being any government services that could do the job.

Also, if Turner suffered the brain injury (one assumes as a teenager or young adult) in the 70s, that puts him either side of 60, and if he’s been drinking seriously on and off for those 40 years his brain may be just about done. Which means somebody else really needs to be responsible for him in a custodial way. And his “friends”, the city and the state apparently aren’t stepping up.

(And yeah, if he were black we wouldn’t be discussing all the individualized reasons/excuses/rationalizations for him threatening his neighbors because he’d be dead or serving a long prison sentence.)