KILLER OF LEBANESE NEIGHBOUR WAGED HATE CAMPAIGN
▶ Stanley Majors, sentenced to life in prison, subjected Khalid Jabara and family to years of racist abuse in Tulsa
The sister of a Lebanese-American man murdered by a racist neighbour says the killer should not have been free after he ran over their mother and waged a years-long hate campaign.
A court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Tuesday sentenced Stanley Majors, 63, to life in prison.
Victoria Jabara Williams told The National that Majors should have been kept in custody after being arrested for a hit and run case in 2015.
“We never should have been in this place,” Mrs Jabara Williams said. “There were so many red flags raised with this defendant.”
Instead, while out on bail in August 2016, he murdered Khalid Jabara, 37.
Mr Jabara was killed on his front porch minutes after calling police in Tulsa to report that his threatening neighbour had a gun.
Testimony in court revealed how Majors had bombarded Mr Jabara and his elderly parents with racist insults, calling them “dirty Arabs” and “filthy Lebanese”.
The Jabaras had fled Lebanon’s civil war decades ago.
Majors was found guilty by a jury this month. The Jabara family did not attend Tuesday’s hearing when he was sentenced to life without parole.
“We feel that if he hadn’t got out in the first place we would not be in this situation,” Mrs Jabara Williams said. “While we are thankful he is in jail for life, we still feel that something could have been done, something could have prevented my brother being murdered.”
Majors’ hate campaign lasted years. It reached the point when Mr Jabara’s mother, Haifa Jabara, obtained a protective order in 2013 that required Majors to stay 275 metres away and banned him from owning firearms until this year.
But prosecutors said it made little difference. He struck Mrs Jabara with his car, breaking her shoulder and inflicting other injuries, before driving off.
Officers who stopped him later reported that he was drunk, but he was freed from prison while awaiting trial on assault and battery charges, despite prosecutors’ concerns that he posed a major risk.
Mr Jabara’s sister said the family had tried to do everything properly, working within the legal system to protect themselves from a dangerous man.
“It really was a perfect storm of social issues in this case, whether it is gun violence, judicial reform, the hate crime aspect,” Mrs Jabara Williams said.
“If my brother was in jail and had run over someone’s mum, as an Arab man would he have got out of jail? Or as a black man would the judge have let him out? I won’t ever know the answer to that.”
Now she is working with other family members to reform bail guidance and strengthen victims’ rights in the judicial process.
She has set up a memorial library filled with books on social justice at her daughter’s school.
“He was the beautiful one of the family, not just handsome but with a beautiful heart, sensitive and giving,” Mrs Jabara Williams said of her brother.
“He was a devoted son to my parents. He was helping my father who is elderly and has major health issues.
“He stayed with them, which is a common thing in the Middle East but not so much in the US.”
The defence argued that Majors was a mentally ill gay man, who believed his neighbours were Muslim and would harm him for his sexuality. His lawyers say they are planning an appeal.
We never should have been in this place. There were so many red flags with this defendant
VICTORIA JABARA WILLIAMS Sister of victim Khalid Jabara (above)