Numerous “witnesses” saw the verbal altercation and not the shooting.
A man who was shot Thursday while driving through a black neighborhood with the Confederate battle flag is not racist, a friend says.
“I’ve never known him to use any racial slurs,” Cally Baker said Saturday. “Unless someone (provoked) him, I can’t imagine him just blurting out the N-word.”
And the flag?
“It is a Confederate flag, I can attest to that,” Baker said. “But it has a military emblem on it … so it was something he was proud of more or less because of the military aspect of it.”
Baker also disputed accounts that the 28-year-old man, who is white and a reported Army veteran and Arkansas native, threatened the shooter and others with a machete.
“He had absolutely no weapon on him but the machete, and it was in the back of the truck, so he had no way to get to it,” she said.
The incident occurred about 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the 1400 Block of Fassnacht Avenue, near City Cemetery on the near west side.
According to witnesses, the man, driving a white SUV with a Confederate battle flag, pulled into J & J convenience store, got into a verbal exchange with a group of black men and started shouting racial slurs. He also displayed a machete, witnesses said.
The man pulled away, witnesses said, but then stopped and reversed toward the black men, at which point one of them opened fire, hitting him in the cheek and upper back.
The man was later found one block east of the scene, at Fassnacht and Birdsell Street, conscious and standing but bleeding from his wounds.