Ronald Gasser, the man who shot and killed former NFL running back Joe McKnight in a fit of road rage, was arrested on Monday night and charged with manslaughter. Subsequently, on Tuesday morning, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand gave a truly bizarre press conference that included details of the crime. But those details ended up being overshadowed by his NSFW, uncensored reading of internet comments that were apparently directed at police and community leaders after the sheriff's office temporarily released Gasser from custody without charges on Friday.
Normand thanked the police and community leaders for doing "what was in the best interest of the community" in recent days. Then, for some reason, he decided to share some of the messages that they have received on social media since they started investigating the circumstances surrounding the McKnight shooting.
"It's not fair to be called, 'You punk ass Uncle Tom coon, we saw you sell out to them, you rat ass f*ggot punk,'" Normand said. "That's the tone of what we're calling our elected leaders for standing up and simply saying, 'Let justice prevail and let the process take its course.' To go on to say, 'You ass kissing f*ggot that has done little to our community, all we know is that you are a b*tch puppet, you rat ass looking coon on TV. I bet they made you say that puppet boy. I know what I see. I know that Normand is a piece of shit and you stood behind that white boy with that bullshit, n*gga. You won't even stand with your people you self-serving son of a b*tch." Normand then said, "Really?!" before saying the tone of those comments were mirrored in many others he didn't read.
Later on at the press conference, Normand explained why he delivered the comments verbatim after he was asked about the language he used. "Because we in this society today are demanding immediate results," he said. "And we don't even know what we're talking about. And we're castigating people that are trying to do the right thing." He explained that the comments he read weren't even the worst of them.
When asked if he thought reading the comments out loud would change anything, Normand said he hoped it would. "Yeah! I hope it gets everyone to realize how crazy we're getting," he said. "And that we need to create pause and that we need to understand that people [are] just simply asking to let them do their job, don't rush to judgment, and don't start creating this furor as it relates to this just simply because they said, 'Let them work through this process.'"
Normand was then pressed further by a reporter who asked him whether or not he understands where the "fear and angst" that many people feel comes from "when a young black man is shot to death and a white man who's admitted to killing him is sitting at home." Normand responded by saying, "If the victim would've been white, do you think that this would've been said?" He then cited the community's black-on-black crime statistics and told the reporter that the "fear and angst" was misdirected.
You can watch a portion of the press conference in the clip above.
