VALENTINE’S SWEETS
School, diocese report clears Ky. students in video incident
Justin Barry, owner of Edible Arrangements, on Fournier Street in Park Square, Woonsocket, holds a sampling of his Valentine’s Day specials that were selling briskly on Wednesday. Barry and his crew were in early Wednesday morning and planned on working through the early evening fulfilling Valentine’s Day orders of chocolate-dipped strawberries, doubly-delicious fruit bouquets, and their ‘Share Love Platter.’ Barry said Valentine’s Day is one of his busiest holidays, including Mother’s Day and Christmas. For more photos of the workers in action Wednesday,
A report released Wednesday about an encounter between Kentucky high school students and Native American activists at the Lincoln Memorial found “no evidence” that the students made “offensive or racist statements,” either in response to the Black Hebrew Israelites who shouted slurs at them or to a drum-bearing Native American.
The Jan. 18 incident drew national attention after a participant posted a short video clip of the Native American, Nathan Phillips, in what initially appeared to be a standoff with one of the students, Nick Sandmann, who was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat. The clip drew immediate and widespread condemnation online, with many commenters accusing Sandmann and other students from the private school, Covington Catholic near Cincinnati, of mocking and intimidating Phillips.
Officials at the high school and the Diocese of Covington initially were among those who condemned the boys’ actions. However, after a fuller picture of the encounter emerged in other video clips, including a clip in which Sandmann appears to try to calm a fellow student, the diocese commissioned an independent firm to interview the students and their chaperones, locate third-party witnesses, review social media posts and news articles, find any additional video of the standoff and determine exactly what happened.
The firm, Greater Cincinnati Investigation Inc., said four licensed investigators spent approximately 240 hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing about 50 hours of Internet activity, including posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and video from major networks.
On Wednesday, the diocese released the resulting four-page report. In it, investigators concluded that neither Sandmann nor other Covington students had behaved in an offensive manner that day.
“We found no evidence that the students performed a ‘Build the wall’ chant,” the report said, nor that the students made “offensive or racist comments . . . to Phillips or members of his group.”
The report concludes that some students did perform a “tomahawk chop to the beat of Mr. Phillips’ drumming” – an arm motion mimicking the swinging of a tomahawk that many Native Americans find offensive – “and some joined Mr. Phillips’ chant.” But the report makes no further comment on that behavior.
It concludes that the students felt “confused” but not “threatened” when Phillips, who was on the National Mall to take part in the Indigenous Peoples March, approached them but says little more about the standoff between Sandmann and Phillips that sparked the controversy. “An interaction between Mr. Sandmann and Mr. Phillips ended,” the report said. “Chaperones moved students to the buses shortly thereafter.”
The report also says that one of the chaperones told students that if “they engaged in a verbal exchange with the Black Hebrew Israelites, they would receive detention.”
Roger Foys, the Bishop of Covington, welcomed the report. In a statement on the diocese website, Foys wrote that he was pleased “that my hope and expectation” that the inquiry “would ‘exonerate our students so that they can move forward with their lives’ has been realized.”
“Our students were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening,” Foys said in a statement with the report.