A civil court judge in Maine has ordered two white men to pay $1.2 million in damages more than five years after they smashed a Black man’s jaw in a vicious and racially motivated attack.
Superior Court Judge Richard Mulhern handed down the civil judgment Thursday after the men responsible for the attack, Maurice Diggins and his nephew Dusty Leo, missed a pretrial deadline to submit arguments and discovery evidence.
Both have been incarcerated since they were convicted in 2020 on federal hate crime charges, while neither man had obtained an attorney to argue for them in civil court.
The latest judgment comes more than a year after the victim, Daimon McCollum, filed for damages in civil court to force the assailants to cover medical expenses stemming from the assault.
At the time, Diggins and Leo filed handwritten responses to the lawsuit, arguing they couldn’t afford to pay damages to McCollum or a lawyer. Diggins said his commissary account was frozen because of the $15,000 he was ordered to pay in fines and restitution during the criminal trial, which he also could not afford.
“Your Honor, I have no means to pay Mr. McCollum if judgment is made in favor of Mr. McCollum,” Diggins wrote.
They also asked for additional time to lawyer up in the matter, which the judge denied in his ruling on Thursday, in which Mulhern ordered them to pay $700,000 in punitive damages and $500,000 in compensatory damages on top of the restitution they were ordered to pay upon their convictions three years ago.
The Feb. 25, 2018, attack on McCollum outside a gas station happened around 1 a.m. and was preceded by a separate unprovoked assault on a Sudanese man outside a bar in Portland, according to the federal indictment.
After beating up the victim in Portland, the men drove 20 miles to their hometown of Biddeford, where they encountered McCollum outside a 7-Eleven store.
Ahead of the confrontation, Diggins and Leo hurled racial slurs toward McCollum moments before Leo sneaked up from behind and sucker punched McCollum in the face, breaking his jaw in several places and knocking him to the ground.
McCollum said he stopped at the store to pick up a snack after a celebratory gathering with his wife and kids, while the ensuing attack was captured on the store’s surveillance cameras, showing McCollum fleeing his attackers as they chased him down in a pickup truck.
“The defendant violently attacked a Black man for no reason other than his race,” said Kristen Clarke, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during federal sentencing in December 2021. “This sentencing marks the final chapter in the long road to justice for the victims of these violent, racially-motivated crimes.”
During the trial, McCollum testified that he believed he “would have lost my life that night” if he hadn’t been able to get up and run.
Diggins is currently serving 10 years in prison for the crime, followed by three years of supervised release, after he was convicted on two counts of committing a hate crime and one count of conspiracy. He lost his appeal in the First Circuit Court of Boston in June 2022.
Leo, who was 30 at the time of the attack, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for his role, which led to one count of committing a hate crime and one count of conspiracy.
He is scheduled to be released on Nov. 22.
The civil complaint brought by McCollum referenced white supremacist tattoos on Diggins, including swastikas and the initials “WPWW” for “White Pride World Wide,” which sealed his fate with jurors in 2020 while playing into Mulhern’s decision to impose a hefty penalty.
During the hate crimes trial, U.S. District Judge Nancy Torrensen noted that Diggins called his spouse from jail and asserted that a majority of Maine residents shared his racist views, implying that the shared sentiments would ultimately shield him from a guilty verdict.
Since the attack, McCollum has endured months of emotional distress while undergoing rehab and numerous surgeries to reconstruct his damaged jaw, which had to be wired shut for a month, according to his lawyer, Allyson Knowles.
Although Diggins and Leo might lack the cash to pay the judgment, Knowles said she planned to pursue money through seizures and other asset recovery measures empowered by the court.
