SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) – Delaware’s attorney general is calling on the federal government to investigate an allegedly racially motivated traffic stop in Georgia.
On April 20, Liberty County Sheriff’s Office deputies pulled over a charter bus with the Delaware State University women’s lacrosse team on board.
While the sheriff has said there was nothing out of the ordinary about the traffic stop, the team and the university’s president have argued otherwise.
Now, Attorney General Kathleen Jennings is urging “a full examination” of the events that took place. She made the request official in a letter penned to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, on Wednesday.
“I’m deeply troubled,” Jennings wrote to Clarke.
“A traffic stop (for what can charitably be called a minor infraction) led to a slew of sheriff’s deputies searching virtually every bag belonging to student-athletes who were returning home from their season finale,” she continued. “I’m told that all the deputies were white, and almost everyone whose bags were searched is black.
“These students and coaches were not in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time. They hail from one of the oldest and finest HBCUs in the country. By all accounts these young women were [representing] their school and our state with class — and they were rewarded with a questionable at-best search through their belongings in an effort to find contraband that did not exist.”
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