A Florida corrections officer is now on trial for beating a Black inmate who wanted to marry a white woman.
In July 2015, the inmate, Darren Glover, wanted to marry his fiance at the Apalachee Correctional Institute, but Correctional Officer Michael Baxter took exception to the marriage.
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Glover had only just had a photo shoot for the wedding when Baxter called him to his office the next day. Glover claimed that Baxter tried to criticize his shoes in the photoshoot, but when Glover argued that he hadn’t done anything wrong, Baxter attacked him, and another guard helped to hold him down.
“I just laid down and took the beating,” Glover said during his testimony, according to the News Herald. ”I just wanted to go home. I didn’t want anymore time.”
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“Whining and crying”
Shannon Watts, Baxter’s secretary at the time, said that she ran for help when she saw the beating begin. But by the time she got back, Glover was on the ground and bloody.
“I could hear inmate Glover whining and crying through the door. He was whining like he was hurt,” she recalled.
Baxter, who Watts considered to be like family, asked her to help her falsify a report of the incident. While she initially did so, she said that her conscience bothered her until she simply had to come forward with the truth. She said that she couldn’t get the memory of Glover crying on the ground out of her mind and prayed to God that he would take it away from her.
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“The crying, the whining — they haven’t been removed,” Watts said. “They are still there. This was eating at me, and I had to get some relief.”
Watts also testified that Glover’s fiance asked her why the wedding had been cancelled, and she asked Baxter about the incident.
“That n***er did not need to be marrying a white woman,” Watts said Baxter’s wife told her. “He needed to be in confinement all along.”
According to Blavity, closing arguments in the case are expected to be given this week.