Les Jones: Johnia Berry News/Christian and Newsom Murders

April 24, 2007

Johnia Berry > Johnia Berry News/Christian and Newsom Murders

Knoxville News-Sentinel: Johnia Berry walk kicks off '07 National Crime Victims' Rights Week.

Metro Pulse: The House on Chipman Street - Has some information about the Johnia Berry case and interviews Remonda Swafford. I met Remonda at the Cokesbury Johnia Berry meeting a few months ago. She's been an outspoken, effective voice for the crime problem in the West Knoxville neighborhood where Johnia was killed.

Beyond that, I found parts of that Metro Pulse article incredibly offensive. The reporter, Leslie Wylie, goes out of her way to minimize and conceal the horrific crime that was at the center of the story.

The opening sentence is "You don't need another rehashing of the grisly details." But perhaps you do, since she omits them. The defendants have been charged with the double carjacking, kidnapping, rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. It's believed Newsom was raped and killed early on, then his body burned. Christian was gang-raped for several days before being murdered. One of the defendants, Vanessa Coleman, who was in the house during that time has stated that while Christian was alive her mouth was rinsed out with cleaning chemicals, presumably to hide DNA evidence.

Wylie implies that interest in the case is largely due to race (Christian and Newsom were white, their accused murderers were black) and includes this quote without disapproval:

"It's a tough question," says Kelly Johnson, a local criminal defense attorney, "because the media is in a position where they have to report those things, and what they have is two young, white people allegedly killed by three African-American gentlemen and an African-American woman. Does the media take more interest in a case when there are white victims? I don't know. Maybe."

I'm not sure that people who have been charged with robbery, kidnapping, rape and murder need to be described as "gentleman" without protest from the reporter. Particularly when the fingerprints of one of the defendants, Lemaricus Davidson, were found on materials in the carjacked vehicle, according to news reports. That clue lead police to 2316 Chipman Street, where Christian's burned body was found in a kitchen trash can.

Wylie goes out of her way to make the issue race, as opposed to sticking to the simple facts of the nightmarish crimes that occurred. Googling for information about the Christian-Newsom murder I did find racist sites that are making hay of the case, but do Wylie and her editors seriously believe that an average person wouldn't be offended and frightened if the victims and accused were of the same race? You have a pair of innocent young UT students going about their lives and being carjacked, raped, murdered, and mutilated by a gang of drug-induced criminals. If that doesn't offend someone then it seems to me that that person's moral compass is broken beyond all repair.

The same article has counterevidence that interest in the Christian-Newsom murders is racially motivated. Johnia Berry was white. We know that her murderer was also white, based on the eyewitness account of her roommate who survived the attack, as well as the DNA obtained from the killer's blood left at the crimes cene. Yet despite Berry's murder being a white-on-white crime there has been tremendous interest in the case. Wylie would have done well to stick to the facts, as Ellen Mellarnee did for her incredible Metro Pulse feature about Berry's murder.

Instead, Wylie and her editors hide the facts from the reader, assuming that either the reader is a racist or that someone will use the facts to racial advantage. I don't have any use for a newspaper that keeps the facts from its readers for fear that some people are too stupid and racist to handle those facts.

- WVLT Special Coverage of Christian-Newsom Murders
- Wikipedia entry for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom Murder

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Comments

Wylie goes out of her way to make the issue race? Duh. That wasn't an article about the crime; it was an article about the reaction to the crime. Omission of the "grisly details" was deliberate because Wylie was exploring how neighbors and community respond to horrible murders, and she fairly explicitly states that. She was intentionally stepping back from the crime to look instead at the community. At the time the article ran, the grisly details were ubiquitous, and Wylie chose to do what alternative newspapers tend to do: look at a story from a different angle. Pretending that amounts to censorship is baffling.

The fact that she discusses both evidence for and evidence against a racial bias suggests balance and a willingness to allow the reader to draw conclusions. While she explored the racial element, she spent more time discussing how neighborhoods respond to such crimes.

Your claim that the Johnia Berry case received "tremendous interest" flies in the face of reality. Johnia's murder got such brief coverage that her family has had to work doggedly to publicize the crime in hopes of rousting a lead to the killer. Obviously you know this, yet you claim otherwise to serve your point.

The fact that you want Wylie to have written an entirely different article -- one that rehashes what everyone had been hearing from every other media source -- is essentially irrelevant. Blaming Wylie for Kelly Johnson's use of the word "gentlemen" is bizarre. It's not a reporter's job to cast "disapproval" on the diction of an interviewee, although in the Fox News age where editorializing within news reports is routine, I can see where maybe you've gotten spoiled by never having to notice that sort of thing for yourself. Shouldn't your beef be with Johnson, not Wylie? Is it possible Wylie put that quote out there because she felt it was provocative enough as is? If I'm not mistakenly, Metro Pulse later ran a letter questioning Johnson's use of that word.

I found the article a bit wishy-washy, but it seemed to me that she brought the Berry murder into the discussion to illuminate her family's struggle for media attention and to point out that years later the neighborhood where that crime occurred is still dealing with the fear engendered by the killing and the fact that the killer remains at large. I would think you'd be grateful to Wylie for keeping that crime at the fore, not angry at her for going beyond basic crime reporting.

Posted by: persimmon at April 24, 2007

Actually, the white racists are planning to have a "support" rally for the white victims family here in Knoxville. That had planned to do it on Memorial Day weekend. Blanket the city with flyers and have a rally.

The race part of this is huge for some people. It would not be news at all to them otherwise.

Posted by: Swanky at April 24, 2007

Persimmon: It took some time for interest in Johnia's case to get where it is now, but it's undeniable that there's tremendous interest in her case. I'm saying the interest existed. You're splitting hairs over when it developed, without denying that it exists.

Swanky: I'm sure for some people race is the issue. But for what I assume to be an average person the interest is caused by the horrific nature of the crime and a desire for justice for the two victims.

Posted by: Les Jones at April 24, 2007

This is the first I've heard about the case, out here on the west coast it's totally invisible.

Posted by: DirtCrashr at April 24, 2007

I just got an email about the case from my brother in Dallas. Up here in Minnesota, we've heard nothing. I googled it and cannot believe what I'm reading. What those two people went through is horrific.

Whenever anything involves different races, some people flip out and make it racist. Hello - Duke, anyone? Not everything is racially-driven, but the media LOVES to play that card. Funny how a white killing a white or black killing a black is "not news"...then again, there's no "story" when that happens (I'm saying that sarcastically).

What these people did was horrible and if they are proven to be the people that did it (and from what I'm reading on both sides, they are) they will be removed from society and put in jail...though if there's a death penalty in TN, a bullet would suffice. Why should taxpayers pay for them for the rest of their lives?

Posted by: Casey at May 16, 2007

You know that if the races in this case were reversed we would have Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and all their toadies crawling all over our town, whining to every tv camera they could find. I wish the death penalty here would be easier to get and more swiftly carried out.

Posted by: ronin at May 19, 2007