JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — First Coast News is not sharing the content from the manifesto left by the person who murdered three people in a racially motivated shooting at a Jacksonville Dollar General. However, we are sharing the messages from people close to the families of the victims as well as community leaders about the pain caused by the shooting and the divisiveness written in the manifesto.
Those close to people who were directly affected said that the release of the manifesto is another pain that the victims families and the community feels. The also hope it's a pain that no other family ever has to experience.
"This is the man who destroyed their family," said Jacksonville attorney John Phillips, who represents the family of Angela Carr, one of the victims in the Dollar General shooting. Jerrald Gallion and AJ Laguerre Jr. were also murdered in the shooting.
While Phillips said that he will use the manifesto as part of his wrongful death lawsuit, he urges his clients and the community not to read it.
"I've read it, it's hard to read, the n-word is written hundreds of times," said Phillips, "he advocates for the assassination of people by race, period."
Phillips added that he believes race relations in Jacksonville are tense right now.
"It's not good and what bothers me the most as a civil rights lawyer in this city is we're getting further apart and there will be entities and people that read this and buttress their own racist beliefs and feel like it's ok to hate and ok to divide," said Phillips, "we're in a country that's repeatedly just more and more divisive every day and it's just got to stop."
In the days, weeks and months after the shooting, memorials to the three victims were placed outside of the Dollar General, but pain also remains.
"It hurts our whole community, it hurts our city in general," said Reverend Willie McLaurin of St. Andrew A.M.E. Church in Jacksonville Beach. McLaurin added that the rhetoric described in the manifesto is harmful and ignorant.
"Hatred comes from fear, fear of not knowing a person's culture," said McLaurin.
But instead of continuing that divisiveness, McLaurin hopes painful events like this can bring different sides of our community together.
"It's amazing how we can band together when devastations or disasters come," said McLaurin, "but why can't we do that every day? Joining forces walking hand in hand together, making our communities and our neighborhoods safe.
Phillips plans to file his lawsuit in February but hopes this will lead law enforcement and law makers to take actions that will prevent this from happening again.
"We have to investigate how these racists, how these deviants empower each other and communicate and how they obtain firearms and who knew"
When the manifesto was released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Sheriff T.K. Waters released a statement saying that the investigation into the Dollar General shooting is complete and that releasing the manifesto poses no hinderance to the investigation.
The shooter killed himself at the scene and no additional arrests have been made.