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<h6><span style="color: #999999;"><em>&#8216;Race was not a factor in Lecroy’s actions and he was trying to eliminate an annoying neighbor who happened to be black&#8217;,</em> &#8211; Defense attorney, Erica Soderdahl</span></h6>
<h6><strong>Brandon Lecroy of Greenwood County, South Carolina was sentenced to spend a decade in federal prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to a race-motivated murder-for-hire plot ;</strong></h6>
<h6><strong>Lecroy, 26, pled guilty to federal charges for paying $500 to a purported white supremacist hitman to kill his black neighbor, &#8216;F.J.&#8217;, ; in Oct</strong></h6>
<h6><strong>Lecroy claimed the target brought it on, constantly coming onto Lecroy&#8217;s property, trying to start fights, asking for food and to use the phone, his defense attorney said</strong></h6>
<h6><strong>Lecroy unknowingly hired an undercover FBI agent as </strong><strong>the &#8216;hitman&#8217;, after a</strong><strong> cop in South Carolina tipped off the feds about the defendant who had reached out to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan about killing his neighbor</strong></h6>
<h6><b>He was overheard telling the undercover agent over the phone that he wanted the purported hitman to &#8216;[lynch], hang his black neighbor from a tree&#8217; ;</b></h6>
<h6><strong>Lecroy&#8217;s attorney told the judge her client ; wasn&#8217;t planning a racially-motivated crime, but simply trying to kill an extremely troublesome neighbor who also happened to be African American</strong></h6>
<h6><strong>She said target brought it on by constantly coming onto Lecroy&#8217;s property trying to start fights, asking for food and requesting to use the phone</strong></h6>
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<h6 class="mobile-gallery-icon"><strong><img class="alignnone wp-image-315322" src="https://konniemoments.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Brandon-Lecroy-2-300x167.png" alt="" width="834" height="464">A decade in fed prison: Brandon Lecroy, [photo], of Greenwood County, North Carolina, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to a race-motivated murder-for-hire plot in Oct</strong></h6>
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<p class="mol-para-with-font">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.<br />
Lecroy pled guilty to the racist murder-for-hire plot back in October.<br />
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US District Judge Bruce Howe Hendricks determined that Lecroy&#8217;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&#8217;t a factor.<br />
&#8216;It&#8217;s one thing to think these thoughts, but it&#8217;s a crime to undertake to do harm to another,&#8217; Hendricks said on Thursday.<br />
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&#8217;s counter terrorism division.<br />
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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 &#8216;F.J.&#8217; in court documents.<br />
Lecroy&#8217;s federal public defender, Erica Soderdahl, said F.J. continually came onto her client&#8217;s property trying to start fights, asking for food and to use Lecoy’s phone.<br />
She said her client had tried numerous times to get local police to stop the neighbor from trespassing.<br />
&#8216;But F.J. kept coming back,&#8217; Soderdahl told the judge, according to the Associated Press. &#8216;It&#8217;s not about an overriding feeling toward a race &#8211; it&#8217;s about one individual.&#8217;<br />
An undercover FBI agent pretending to be a white supremacist hitman responded to Lecroy&#8217;s communique. During a March 20, 2018, phone call, Lecroy told the agent &#8216;$500 and he&#8217;s a ghost&#8217;, referring to his neighbor.<br />
The State reported Lecroy also told the &#8216;hitman&#8217; he wanted him to hang his neighbor from a tree and that he had &#8216;plans to take over the victim&#8217;s property,&#8217; according to an affidavit.<br />
The prosecution played audio recordings of Lecroy&#8217;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 tundercover then ;agent had a face-to-face meeting with Lecroy who gave him a $100 down payment for the hit.<br />
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Lecroy&#8217;s attorney argued that going online and looking up the local Klan chapter was her client&#8217;s final act of desperation in dealing with his troublesome neighbor.<br />
&#8216;Brandon called the KKK because who else was he going to call?&#8217; Soderdahl argued. &#8216;It had nothing to do with the color of his skin.&#8217;<br />
Federal prosecutor William Watkins in rebutal countered that Lecroy&#8217;s attempted hit was clearly racially motivated: &#8220;The fact that he reached out to the KKK &#8211; this is not a low-functioning individual,&#8221; Watkins said.<br />
&#8220;It&#8217;s telling that to get a black person eliminated, he turned to the KKK&#8230; He doesn&#8217;t call a biker gang. What he had in mind for his neighbor was very race specific&#8230; He targeted him because of his race.&#8221;</p>
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South Carolina man who tried to hire a white supremacist hitman to hang his black neighbor from a tree is jailed 10 years, but Brandon Lecroy insists his crime was not racially motivated
