If there was any doubt about the true feelings of Michael Dunn, the Florida man who shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis during an argument over loud music, the 46-year-old laid them to rest in letters that he wrote from jail to family members and friends.
Though Dunn has claimed that he’s not racist and says he acted in self-defense during the fatal confrontation, the man goes off on a racist rant in a letter to his grandmother that was obtained by News4Jax.
“The jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs,” Dunn writes—apparently not aware that jailers read all of his mail. “This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots, when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”
But Dunn then tries to claim he’s not racist.
“I’m really not prejudiced against race, but I have no use for certain cultures,” he writes. “This gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug ‘culture’ that certain segments of society flock to is intolerable. They espouse violence and disrespect towards women. The black community here in Jacksonville is in an uproar against me — the three other thugs that were in the car are telling stories to cover up their true ‘colors.'”
Dunn opened fire on a car containing Davis and three other teens, firing eight or nine shots into the vehicle because he claimed he saw one of them with a gun after they got into an argument with him at a Jacksonville gas station about the loud music they were playing.
The Nov. 23 shooting death of Davis got a great deal of attention last year because it seemed so senseless and outrageous—and occurred in Florida in the same year that George Zimmerman killed another 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
According to the Florida Times-Union, officials in the state attorney’s office said they won’t be seeking the death penalty against Dunn.
Dunn’s former lawyer, Robin Lemonidis, gave the following recount in a television interview with WJXT of Dunn’s recounting of the incident:
“Uh, ‘Kill that mother (expletive),’ ‘That mother (expletive) is dead,’ ‘You dead (expletive),’” Lemonidis said Dunn heard from the teens. “And he sees that much of a shotgun coming up over the rim of the SUV, which is up higher than his Jetta, and all he sees are heavily tinted front windows that are up and the back windows that are down, and the car has at least four black men in it, and he doesn’t know how old anyone is, and he doesn’t know anything, but he knows a shotgun when he sees one because he got his first gun as a gift from his grandparents when he was in third grade.”
But the teenagers said they weren’t armed and police found no evidence to back up Dunn’s claims.
In another letter to his grandmother, Dunn rails at the media.
“I am amazed at what is going on with the way the media has been covering this case,” he writes. “Their [sic] have been several other shootings here in Jacksonville, yet they are all either black-on-black or black-on-white, and none of them have garnered any attention from the media. I guess it’s news when someone dares to not to be a victim, but they are twisting it around sand saying I was the ‘bad guy.'”
He continues in the vein in a letter to one of his supporters.
“I’m not getting much in the way of sympathy from the press. They’re a bunch of liberal bastards!” he writes. “They seem to have a lot of racial guilt, or at least the prosecutors [sic] office does. The jail here is almost all black prisoners. You’d think Jacksonville was 90-90% black judging by the makeup of the folks in jail here! … My fear is that if I get 1 black on my jury it will be a mistrial as I am convinced they will be racially biased.”
