COLUMBIA – A Fort Jackson soldier has been charged after a video was posted on social media showing a white man denouncing and threatening a black man walking inside a subdivision of Richland County.
Fort Jackson officials did not disclose the soldier’s name or charges.
Jonathan Pentland was charged with third-degree assault and battery on April 14 and released without bail, according to court records from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department Pentland was ordered not to have direct contact with the victim and to stay 1,000 meters from the workplace, home, school or worship of the victim.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott called the incident “disturbing” during a press conference about the confrontation in The Summit, a large and diverse neighborhood in northeast Richland.
The U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating the incident, Fort Jackson said.
“Fort Jackson leaders do not in any way accept the behavior shown in the recently released video,” the Fort Jackson brigade commander said. General Milford Beagle said in a statement. “This action deeply affects our community: the residents of the Summit, the city of Columbia, the counties of Richland and Lexington, and our Army family.”
He two minute clip posted on Twitter on April 13 shows a man located less than a foot away from the black man, who is on a sidewalk of The Summit.
“Go, right now,” the man says. “What do you do there?”
The black man says he was walking and suggested the white man call the police. A woman who is not seen on camera says officers have been called.
“You’re attacking our neighborhood,” the white man says pushing the black man. “You better leave or I’ll take your (expletive) out of here.”
“I didn’t do anything,” the black man says.
“I’m about to do something to you,” the white man says. “You better start walking.”
Then the white man and the black man exchange accusations about who started the discussion.
“You’re in the wrong (explosive) neighborhood,” the white man shouts. “Exit. Exit.”
The white man said the black man was “harassing the neighborhood.” The black man says he lives in the neighborhood, but does not answer the questions where asked.
“Look, we’re a very close-knit community,” the white man says. “We take care of each other.”
The video does not show how the confrontation began or ended.
Shadae McCallum, who lives in the neighborhood and recorded the video of the confrontation, said people from The Summit, a network of Clemson Road neighborhoods, often walk among the various communities and are not out of the ordinary.
As he walked on April 12, McCallum said he saw a black man confronting women who accused him of harassing his daughters.
A white man came out of a house and was initially quiet, but was quickly irritated, said McCallum, who began his video.
McCallum said he stopped recording when two black women began to move the black man away from the area and thought the situation was over.
But after he stopped recording, the white man followed the black man down the sidewalk, shook his hand at the phone, and stepped on him, McCallum said.
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that the black man in the video is accused of two incidents in the same neighborhood days before the confrontation. A man touched a woman and picked up a baby without consent, according to incident reports from the sheriff’s office.
It was not known whether deputies filed any charges against the black man. The suspect and victim reports were drafted in reports sent to The Post and Courier.
About 40 protesters showed up outside the soldier’s house on April 14, shouting “This is our neighborhood too!”
“This young brother could have been another hashtag instead of a living, breathing warrior,” Jerome Bowers, CEO of One Common Cause: Community Control Initiative, said during the protest.
Four Richland County sheriff vehicles were parked right on the street after the protest and another six patrol cars were parked at Brookland’s nearby Baptist church with officers milling out of the cars.
Neighbors from further afield gathered on the sidewalk, some confused about the source of the activity, in what a resident said was a typically quiet subdivision with newly built houses and houses under construction.
No one answered at the soldier’s front door.
State Senator Mia McLeod, a Democrat in whose district The Summit is located, delivered a passionate speech from the Senate floor asking her colleagues to defend themselves against injustice.
“What else has to happen? It’s like a time bomb,” McLeod said from the Senate podium. “We have to decide right here, right now, whether we will move forward to 2021 or go back to 1921.”
State Rep. Ivory Thigpen, a Democrat who represents The Summit, said, though she understands that something could have happened before the video: “What we saw, in my opinion, was an assault and intimidation.”
“Leaving the race aside, I was infuriated by what I saw as school bullying and I hate bullies,” Thigpen told The Post and Courier. “There needs to be clear information, actions taken, hopefully mediation and resolution will promote harmony in the community.”
Stephen Fastenau i Sean Adcox contributed from Columbia.
This is a developing story and will be updated.