UPDATED
A Texas judge awarded a white college student $3.2 million in attorney’s fees and damages after he endured years of allegations that he bullied his black friend and forced him to drink urine.
Judge Benjamin Smith recently released his decision stemming from a civil trial between Asher Vann and Summer Smith, the mother of Vann’s friend SeMarion Humphrey. Vann also won damages from Kim Cole (pictured, left), the attorney for Smith (pictured, right).
The ruling ends a five-year long saga that began when Humphrey (pictured, middle) accused Vann and his friends of shooting him with a BB gun and forcing him to drink urine when they were all in middle school in 2021. Vann is now in college, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Black Lives Matter and NAACP groups pounced on the story and the mainstream media quickly helped spread the allegations.
However, the controversy began to fall apart as school officials and law enforcement experts looked into the situation.
Both the school’s black assistant principal and a Plano Police department detective did not believe there was probable cause to bring charges, the Free Beacon reported. The detective, Patricia McClure, informed The Fix on Friday that the grand jury also declined to bring charges.
The accused’s version of the story also provides broader context.
First, the white students did not gang up on Humphrey and start shooting him with BB pellets. Rather, they were all dressed up during a winter storm to hunt frogs but could not find any. Humphrey, the black student, asked to be shot by his friends. “Then we all switched and took turns shooting each other,” Vann told the Free Beacon. “Everyone got shot and everyone shot someone.”
Second, the story of being forced to drink urine also is, as could be expected, more about immaturity then racial harassment.
The Free Beacon reported:
As for the allegation that Humphrey was forced to drink urine out of a cup, Vann said that, too, was portrayed in the wrong light. After the group willingly shot each other with their BB guns, they walked back to Vann’s house and decided, collectively, that the first one who fell asleep would get pranked.
“This one kid, he did a prank before where he pissed in a cup and gave it to his little brother,” Vann said. “I woke SeMarion up, handed him the cup. He put it up to his nose, but he didn’t drink it.”
The Free Beacon reports that Smith, SeMarion’s mom, plans to appeal. She also said she still believes Vann is “evil.”
Smith, for her part, reportedly spend more than $100,000 raised from a GoFundMe on herself, including “on luxuries, including a designer dog, dining and travel, beauty products, liquor, vapes, cell phones, car payments, and rent.”
Kim Cole, the attorney who helped Smith on her national media tour, did not provide further comment, the Free Beacon reported.
The jury that found Cole and Smith culpable had four black members on it, the news outlet noted.
Editor’s note: The article has been updated to clarify that Plano Police did not bring charges and with further comments from a detective.
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