2 Black Teens Guilty in Confederate Flag Case Killing

SPRINGFIELD, Tenn. —  Two black teenagers were found guilty of murder Friday in the shooting of a white man who was flying a Confederate flag in the rear of his pickup truck. A 16-year-old was acquitted.

Freddie Morrow and Damien Darden, both 18, were immediately sentenced to life in prison for the 1995 slaying of 19-year-old Michael Westerman, who was shot from a moving car.

Judge Robert Wedemeyer, presiding at the nonjury trial, also convicted the two men of civil rights intimidation and kidnapping.

The defendants’ families left court without commenting.

Westerman’s widow, Hannah, 21, said: “They deserved to die.”

Prosecutors said the three teenagers were angered by the Confederate banner when the truck stopped at a Guthrie, Ky., convenience store. According to testimony, they rounded up two other carloads of people and followed Westerman and his wife.

Morrow said his group had planned to stop Westerman and fight.

But as the vehicles drew even, his friends cried, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” and he fired into Westerman’s pickup.

Hannah Westerman testified that she switched places with her mortally wounded husband and guided their pickup through ditches and into a parking lot.

She said three black men approached the truck, and she raced back onto the highway and drove to a hospital in Clarksville, Tenn.

Defense lawyers argued that the youths should not have been charged with civil rights intimidation because the incident was not started by the flag, but by someone in Westerman’s truck shouting racist epithets.

“What was done that day was stupid, stupid on the part of all these individuals,” Morrow’s lawyer, Carlton Lewis, said in arguing for a verdict of criminally negligent homicide instead of murder.