Meadows Outed as Racist in Weekly News Roundup

Another week has come and gone. Here’s our roundup of five stories you need to know about from the last seven days.

• Following an exchange between U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, who represents North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, and U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan in which Tlaib implied that Meadows is racist, video surfaced from 2012 of Meadows being quite openly racist. The videos show Meadows at a campaign event in June 2012 promoting birtherism, the baseless idea that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
  “2012 is the time we’re going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is,” Meadows says in the video. “We’re going to do it!” He reportedly made a similar remark three days later at another event, as can be seen in the Washington Post‘s video below. 

• CMPD officers arrested an employee of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office on Friday, charging him with sexual assault. Police charged 31-year-old MCSO detention officer Vanquez DeVonte Petty with second-degree rape and second-degree sexual assault following an incident that occurred on Thursday, February 28. Petty was not on duty at the time of the assault. According to CMPD, the 19-year-old victim met Petty on Thursday morning and the two exchanged numbers. He went to her home later that evening, which is when the alleged sexual assault occurred.

• Two students were hospitalized on Thursday morning after the school bus they were in crashed through a condominium building in north Charlotte. Neither of them suffered serious injuries. CMPD cited the bus driver, 35-year-old Lashanta Williams, with failure to maintain lane control. According to the CMPD report, the bus left its lane of travel on the 2600 block of Statesville Avenue and struck a 2018 Kia Optima stopped in a turn lane. It then ran off the road and struck the building.

• Rayquan Borum’s attorneys withdrew a motion for Judge Gregory Hines to recuse himself from Borum’s first-degree murder trial on Friday after an investigation found that Borum did not, in fact, threaten the judge’s life during a jailhouse call, as was originally suspected. Borum reportedly made the call to his mother on February 20 and gave her a name to pass onto some people in Florida to help him with his upcoming trial. While the call was originally believed to be a threat against Hayes’ life, the mother told investigators that the people in Florida were spiritual advisers who would pray against the name. Investigators were able to confirm that claim.

• Five people lost their lives to gun violence in Charlotte over the last week, bringing the total amount of homicides in the city this year to 25. The following people were reported killed by the CMPD: 15-year-old Jenna Hewitt and 51-year-old Matthew Chaplin, killed in a double-murder suicide in Chaplin’s south Charlotte home on Feb. 24; 31-year-old Therrisha Steward, shot to death on Tom Hunter Road on Feb. 26; and Ibn Marshall and Anu’bius Smith, killed in a double murder on Grandin Road in west Charlotte on Feb. 27.