White Man in Indiana Shot by African Americans Over Confederate Flag on His Car

by Warner Todd Huston | July 27, 2015 11:08 am

A white man from Arkansas who was driving through a black neighborhood in South Bend, Indiana was shot by one of a group of black men standing near a quick-mart styled store, police report. The shooting occurred because the white man had a Confederate flag on his vehicle.

A friend of the white man insists[1] that he has never known the victim to be a racist. And the flag has a modern military link to it, not a race-based one.

“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 when the white man drove into the parking lot of a local store to ask directions to a home he was trying to find and the group of black men hanging around the parking lot began to attack him over the flag emblem on his SUV.