*A Black FedEx driver says two white males fired multiple bullets into his delivery vehicle in Brookhaven, Miss., late last month. Luckily the 24-year-old was not injured.
D’Monterrio Gibson of Utica, Miss., told the Mississippi Free Press that the incident occurred on the night of Jan. 24, when he saw a white pickup truck driving toward him while on his delivery route.
“In my mind I’m thinking (the driver) is leaving to go to the store or something like that, but then they get extremely close to me and start blowing their horn,” Gibson said. “I proceed to leave the driveway. As I’m leaving the driveway, he starts driving in the grass trying to cut me off. My instincts kick in, I swerve around him, and I start hitting the gas trying to get out of the neighborhood because I don’t know what his intentions are.
“I drive down about two or three houses. There’s another guy standing in the middle of the street pointing a gun at my windows and signaling to me to stop with his hands, as well as mouthing the word, ‘Stop.’ I shake my head no, I hide behind the steering wheel, and I swerve around him as well. As I swerve around him, he starts firing shots into my vehicle.”
Gibson reported the incident to two supervisors at FedEx.
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“I reached dispatch and let him know what was going on, and I only had a chance to get a little of the story out when he cut me off and he was like, ‘Were you at this address?’ I said yes,” the FedEx driver said. “He was like, well I just got a call of a suspicious person at this address. I was like, ‘Sir, I’m not a suspicious person, I work for FedEx. I was just doing my job.’
“I also let him know that they shot at me, and he was like, ‘Well, they didn’t tell me that.’ Of course they wouldn’t. … He told me to save the rest of my story, and he’d take my name down and give it to my supervisor.”
Once he arrived back at the FedEx station, Gibson’s manager examined the back of the truck, which was a Hertz rental, not an official FedEx truck. Gibson was wearing his FedEx uniform during the harrowing encounter with the two white males.
“There were bullet holes all in the back of the van, inside packages and everything like that,” he said.
The day after the shooting, on Jan. 25, Gibson and one of the FedEx managers traveled to the Brookhaven Police Department to file the police report. Gibson told the Mississippi Free Press that one white officer asked him if he had been “doing anything to make them think (he) looked suspicious.”
“I felt disrespected at that point, because even if I did, they still can’t take the law into their own hand,” Gibson said. “So I told him all I did was my job. If they think that I was suspicious, that was on them. He was like ‘OK, I was just asking.’”
Gibson said the police chief, Kenny Collins (who is Black) “tried to emphasize how unracist the town was, which seemed odd to me.” Per the report, Brookhaven has a history of lynching Black folks.
Gibson learned from police that the driver of the white pickup truck was Gregory Case and the man in the road was his son, Brandon Case. Both turned themselves in at the police station on Feb. 1, per the report. Gregory was charged with conspiracy and Brandon with aggravated assault. They posted bail, $75,000 and $150,000 bonds, respectively, the next day, the Mississippi Free Press reports.
Moore wants the U.S. Department of Justice “to prosecute this as a hate crime,” he said.
“They can’t take the law into their own hands,” Gibson told the Mississippi Free Press. “We’re really just tired of stuff like this happening, always looking suspicious to a certain type of people.”
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