A Kansas man who was arrested for kicking a Black toddler and shouting racist slurs at him has been arrested again for another crime after previously being bailed out.
Trace Riff was booked into the Sedgwick County Detention Facility on Jan. 3 for possession of methamphetamine around 4 a.m., KWCH reported Thursday. A neighbor in an apartment complex reported that a vacant dwelling was being forced open. Police said Riff was found inside of it in possession of meth. Department records obtained by The Eagle show Riff was initially held on $2,500 bond and by that afternoon, it had increased to $50,000.
(Sedgwick County Jail)
Riff had been out on bond for less than a week when he was arrested. He had been taken into custody by the Wichita Police Department Dec. 23 and spent a week in jail after he kicked a 1-year-old boy inside a local grocery store called Dillons. As he did so, Riff also started shouting obscenities and racial slurs, including the child the N-word, The Eagle reported.
Police called it a “racially motivated bias crime.” The NAACP has said the incident is a hate crime and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
“We were barely in the store and [Trace] kicked him in his back,” the boy’s mother, Lashantai Whitaker, told the news station last month of the incident where the toddler was knocked to the floor. “All I heard was a loud thud and my daughter screaming.”
The young boy was not harmed in the “sneak attack,” but Whitaker said Riff “could have done serious damage.”
After being told of his newest stint in jail, the victim’s mother told The Eagle, “They shouldn’t have let him out in the first place. He needs to be in a placement, for his issues. He shouldn’t be walking the streets.”
The Wichita, Kan., CBS affiliate reported that Riff has been in and out of jail for years.
His lengthy criminal history is between the states of Oklahoma and Kansas with a range of charges from meth possession, assaulting an officer, domestic abuse and DUIs.
Local police have said they put the case against Riff, who faces minor charges stemming from his most recent arrest, before the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office on Jan. 2. The [D.A.’s office has said the case is still under review.
