Charges Dropped Against Three for Destroying N.C. Confederate Monument

Toppled Statue Durham NC Jonathan Drew, The Associated Press
Jonathan Drew/AP

Charges have now been dropped against three of the protesters charged with destroying a Confederate statue that stood in downtown Durham, North Carolina, since 1924, reports say.

Defense attorney Scott Holmes told the media that the charges were dropped against Aaron Alexander Caldwell, Myles Spigner and Taylor Cook. According to Holmes, prosecutors said probable cause exists in the cases against the three, but not enough evidence exists to prove their actions beyond a shadow of a doubt, WRAL reported.

The move by prosecutors is the first in the cases against 13 people charged with the August 14 destruction of the 90-year-old statue.

District Attorney Roger Echols, though, warned that the dismissal of these three cases should not be seen as an indication of what is to come in the other ten cases.

“Cases continue to be reviewed until they are disposed. No one should take our dismissals of those three as an indication of what will or won’t happen in the others,” Echols said.

During the August vandalism, protest organizer Loan Tran said, “It needs to be removed. These Confederate statues in Durham, in North Carolina, all across the country.”

As the statue fell the protesters chanted against “fascism,” as well as the Ku Klux Klan, the latter of which was a Democrat-sponsored organization that emerged to terrorize black Republicans and to keep them away from voting in the South after the Civil War.

The Durham County Sheriff vowed to identify as many of the protesters as possible and eventually 13 arrests were made.

Liberals celebrated the destruction of public property in Durham. In fact, three weeks after the vandalism, local teachers were even seen gleefully reenacting the destruction of the monument.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

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