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The murder of a young black man last month by a white man who complained about playing loud music rocked Ashland, Oregon, forcing the liberal college town famous for its Shakespeare Festival to take a serious look at the race relations.
The death of Aidan Ellison, 19, added another name to the list of black men and women whose murders sparked a given racism across the country and fueled a wave in a Black Lives Matter movement.
“What can we say about this witty teenager? He had just started his journey of a lifetime when he was taken from us,” Ellison’s family said in a statement from his mother, Andrea Wofford . “Enough is enough. How many black men must die before this community takes hate crimes seriously?”
On November 23, Robert Keegan shot Ellison in the chest once after complaining about music late at night in a motel parking lot. He is being held without bail after pleading not guilty to second degree murder, manslaughter and other charges.
Keegan, 47, is from the nearby small town of Talent, which was badly damaged by a wildfire in September. He and Ellison were both staying at the motel, but apparently didn’t know each other until that night.
Sunmoon Oh / AP
Keegan claimed Ellison punched him in the face and shot in self-defense, court records show. But a police officer reported that Keegan had no visible injuries to his face and that an autopsy showed no injuries to Ellison’s hands that would have indicated he hit Keegan.
Ashland Police Chief Tighe O’Meara said investigators had found no evidence to support the bias charges against Keegan.
But Julie Akins, mayor-elect of Ashland, said she believed racism was behind the shooting.
“I can speak as a member of the white-bodied community that it is high time we took stock of the systemic racism, which continues to cause the deaths of our brothers and sisters of color,” Akins said. in a press release. “It is no accident that a white man, according to police, chose to take the life of a young black man for playing his music. It is at the root of racism.”
The FBI is working with the Ashland Police Department to assess whether federal laws may have been violated, the police department said Thursday.
On Wednesday evening, a crowd of people stood on a lawn outside the Jackson County Justice Building, near Medford, for a vigil for Ellison. Several black men and women spoke of how they had been profiled or racially stigmatized, and they cried for the young life that had been stifled.
Ashland, a town of 21,000 people located at the foot of a mountain range near the California border, is home to Southern Oregon University and hosts the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually draws hundreds of thousands of people from across the country for drama show.
Dotted with trendy cafes and restaurants, Ashland is considered a trendy town in a conservative part of Oregon. In keeping with Shakespeare’s theme, many buildings in the community have Tudor-style architecture. The motel where the shooting took place is the Stratford Inn, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon.
According to the census, only 1.4% of Ashland residents are black and 92.5% are white. Oregon has a racist history – the state constitution once prohibited black people from living in the state. As a result, the state has a disproportionately small black population compared to much of the rest of the United States.
Black activists in Ashland say the murder exposed the city’s racist mainstream.
“Ashland likes to think it’s a utopia, but it isn’t,” activist Precious Edmonds told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “I don’t feel any safer because I’m here in Ashland. And unfortunately Aidan’s murder is just one example of why this is the case.”
Ellison’s death was reminiscent of the exact murder eight years earlier of Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old black high school student, who was shot and killed by a white man in Florida following an argument over loud music. Michael Dunn was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
The Oregon shoot drew national attention. A pressure group led by the former Representative Gabby Giffords Arizona, who survived a gunshot to the head in 2011, called the murder “insane.”
“Listening to music should never end in death. The presence of a gun makes conflict deadly, and the victims are disproportionately people of color,” the group said on Facebook.
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