Charges Dropped Against Man Accused of Hitting BLM Protester With His Car

Charges against a white man accused of running over a Black Lives Matter protestor in Johnson City, Tennessee, have been dropped.

Jared Benjamin Lafer was charged with assault in September 2020 after a cellphone video of the incident outside a Johnson City restaurant. The video clearly showed a vehicle driving through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in a crosswalk.

The alleged victim in the case, Johnathon Bowers, broke both legs in the incident.

After the hearing, Lafer’s attorney claimed his client was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his way home from dinner with his wife and three kids in the car.

“This is not a case about racism,” Lafer’s attorney Mac Meade explained. “He did what he felt was necessary to get out of a situation that he felt was dangerous to his family.”

NAACP officials pushed to have the incident treated as a hate crime. Robin Ellis, president of the NAACP, wrote a letter calling for the Johnson City NAACP to take action.

“This incident was not an accident,” Ellis said in the letter, citing screenshots of Lafer’s social media posts where he joked about running over protesters and labeled Black Lives Matter a Marxist organization.

Lafer’s social media accounts were deleted shortly after the incident.

Charged against Lafer were eventually downgraded from a C Felony to a D Felony, and the case was bound over to the grand jury.

That grand jury voted against an indictment in the case.