The attention-seeking white supremacist charged in the fatal stabbing of a 66-year old black man in Manhattan this week traveled to New York City specifically to target and kill black men, authorities said Wednesday.
The suspect was identified as 28-year old James Harris Jackson, an army veteran who served in Afghanistan for four years. He told police he has a deep-seated hatred of black men — going back decades — and even penned a manifesto about his racist views.
Authorities said Jackson confessed to traveling to New York City from Maryland on a bus for the sole purpose of killing black people.
“He came here to target male blacks,” Assistant Chief Bill Aubry told reporters at a news conference. “[He] picked New York because it’s the media capital of the world. He knew what he was doing coming up here.”
Aubry said Jackson arrived from Baltimore on Friday and checked in a Midtown hotel. Video surveillance footage had caught him wandering through the city on Monday, following various people of color.
Around 11.30pm on Monday, Jackson violently attacked a 66 year-old Timothy Caughman, a bottle and can collector, as he was ruffling through a trash can. He stabbed him multiple times in the chest with a 26 inch black mini-sword.
According to ABC news, the old man stumbled his way to a nearby police station before collapsing to the ground. He was later pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital.
Jackson turned himself in shortly after midnight Wednesday, telling officers at the NYPD Times Square station that they “need[ed] to arrest [him].”
“I have the knife in my pocket” he allegedly told police.
The stabbing is being investigated as a hate crime.
“Based on statements that he made, the subject, as well as a preliminary review of video, it reveals that the attack on [victim] Timothy Caughman was clearly racially motivated,” Aubry said during the news conference.
Jackson has been taken in custody and is being charged with first degree murder, police said. Authorities are looking to upgrade charges to a racially motivated crime.
He has not yet entered a plea bargain.
On Tuesday, a childhood friend of Dylan Roof — the white supremacist sentenced to death for the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — was sentenced to two years in prison for failing to report the planned shooting spree to authorities.
In the 15 years since the September 11th attacks, white supremacists and anti-government radicals have accounted for the death of 48 Americans, according to the New America Foundation.