South Carolina man who tried to hire a white supremacist hitman to hang his black neighbor from a tree insists his crime was not racially motivated
- Brandon Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood County, South Carolina was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Thursday
- In October, Lecroy pleaded guilty to federal charges for paying $500 to a purported white supremacist hitman to kill his black neighbor, ‘F.J.’
- Lecroy claimed F.J. kept coming onto Lecroy’s property, trying to start fights, asking for food and to use the phone, according to his defense attorney
- But the ‘hitman’ Lecroy thought he hired was actually an undercover FBI agent
- A cop in South Carolina previously tipped off the feds about Lecroy after Lecroy reached out to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan about killing his neighbor
- Lecroy told the undercover agent over the phone that he wanted the purported hitman to hang his black neighbor from a tree
- Lecroy’s attorney told the judge her client was only trying to get rid of an extremely troublesome neighbor who also happened to be African American
- She said F.J. kept coming onto Lecroy’s property trying to start fights, asking for food and to use the phone, and that the alleged hit was not racially motivated
Brandon Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood County, North Carolina, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Thursday
Brandon Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood County, North Carolina, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to attempting to hire a hitman from the Ku Klux Klan to lynch his black neighbor from a tree.
Lecroy pleaded guilty to the racist murder-for-hire plot back in October.
US District Judge Bruce Howe Hendricks determined that Lecroy’s actions technically qualified as a hate crime, but emphasized that planning to have someone else killed was such a serious offense that she would have sentenced him to the maximum penalty allowed by law even if race wasn’t a factor.
‘It’s one thing to think these thoughts, but it’s a crime to undertake to do harm to another,’ Hendricks said on Thursday.
Federal agents began investigating Lecroy more than a year ago after receiving a tip from a local law enforcement official who works with the FBI’s counter terrorism division.
The unnamed officer alerted the FBI that Lecroy had reached out to a local KKK chapter, saying he wanted to pay someone affiliated with the group to kill his African-American neighbor, identified only as ‘F.J.’ in court documents.
Lecroy’s federal public defender, Erica Soderdahl, said F.J. continually came onto her client’s property trying to start fights, asking for food and to use Lecoy’s phone.
She said her client had tried numerous times to get local police to stop the neighbor from trespassing.
‘But F.J. kept coming back,’ Soderdahl told the judge, according to the Associated Press. ‘It’s not about an overriding feeling toward a race – it’s about one individual.’
An undercover FBI agent pretending to be a white supremacist hitman responded to Lecroy’s communique. During a March 20, 2018, phone call, Lecroy told the agent ‘$500 and he’s a ghost’, referring to his neighbor.
The State reported Lecroy also told the ‘hitman’ he wanted him to hang his neighbor from a tree and that he had ‘plans to take over the victim’s property,’ according to an affidavit.
The prosecution played audio recordings of Lecroy’s phone calls with the undercover agent, the AP reported. Lecroy could be heard using racist language while suggesting the supposed hitman could use a flaming cross during the murder.
Eventually the FBI agent had a face-to-face meeting with Lecroy who gave him a $100 down payment for the hit.
Lecroy’s attorney argued going online and looking up the local Klan chapter was her client’s final act of desperation in dealing with his troublesome neighbor.
‘Brandon called the KKK because who else was he going to call?’ Soderdahl argued. ‘It had nothing to do with the color of his skin.’
But federal prosecutor William Watkins told the judge that Lecroy’s attempted hit was clearly racially motivated.
‘The fact that he reached out to the KKK – this is not a low-functioning individual,’ Watkins said, according to the AP. ‘It’s telling that to get a black person eliminated, he turned to the KKK… He doesn’t call a biker gang. What he had in mind for his neighbor was very race specific… He targeted him because of his race.’