Hate crimes are rising in the United States. An ABC Action News I-Team review of FBI data dating back to 2002 for Florida reveals a record-high percentage of hate crimes involving assault in 2020, the most recent year available.
A Pinellas County case is one example of the larger trend. In August 2021, a Black man and his family were attacked by while driving on Starkey Road around 10 p.m.
Jason Thomas was with his girlfriend, Briann Perez, driving to her home in Seminole after celebrating her father's birthday. His then 4-year-old daughter was in the backseat. A stranger pulled up beside them.
"He's hanging out of his window, shouting and playing loud music, and at the time, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt and just thinking he’s pointing at my side or trying to warn me or something," Thomas told the I-Team.
Thomas rolled down his window.
"Racist remarks and stuff like that," Thomas said. "So I realized that was — he wasn’t really pointing at my tire. He was doing gun, you know, gestures and stuff like that. As he was saying what he was saying.”
Perez was in the passenger seat.
"I've never seen that much hate," she said. "You just hear the N-word flying at us."
“I had to try to roll up my window and try to ignore him, and that’s when he started to like — push us off of the road. And I avoided it by speeding up. And then he got behind us, and I thought he was going to hit us," Thomas said. “He pulls up alongside us again and tries to push us off the road again. At this point, there is a third lane, a turning lane, that opens up. So I get into the turning lane to try to pull over, stop, let him just go, you know, and he actually hits us."
Jordan Patrick Leahy, 28 years old, side-swiped Thomas's car. At the stop light, he stayed beyond Leahy's car and grabbed his phone to get a picture of the license plate.
"He jumps out of his car as I'm taking the picture," Thomas said. "I say, ‘Hey, call the cops.’ And I hop out.”
The I-Team obtained Pinellas County Sheriff's Office body camera footage from that August 2021 night.
“I’m not going to sit there like a sitting duck with my girlfriend and my daughter in my car. So, I get out, because I don’t know what he has — if I’m going to get shot, I’d rather me get shot than them get shot as well, because I don’t know what he has, so I stepped out, walked up to him, ‘What's your problem?’” Thomas told an officer at the scene.
In the video, Thomas described putting Leahy in a chokehold.
"He swung, I put him to sleep, and then when he woke up, I just tried to hold him down," Thomas told one of the officers.
According to the offense report, a witness observed Leahy approaching Thomas's vehicle "in an aggressive manner."
In the body camera video, an officer said to the witness, "So you rolled up, just saw him detaining the other guy."
"Yeah, and he wasn't, like, kept — he didn't keep throwing punches or anything," he said of Thomas. "The guy was still trying to wrestle around, and all he was doing was just like, 'Stay here, stay here.'”
Thomas told the I-Team he's been in martial arts since he was a kid.
“With jujitsu, I guess I knew what to do," he said of detaining Leahy. "What was on my mind was more — I don’t want the cops to come and see a black man holding a white guy down and shooting me. So I was like, as soon as I saw them, I waved and said, 'Hey, I’m the good guy here; get him, please.' "
Reflecting on that night, Thomas said he usually doesn't care what people have to say about him.
"With remarks and things like that, I just brush it off. I try not to let it bother me. But it’s just like, I think about other people, in the sense of, like, what it would have done to someone else. Or the fact that my daughter was there, like what she now has to remember, you know, and think about people," Thomas said. "Even now, she’ll ask me questions like, ‘Am I a good girl? Am I a good girl?’ Because she doesn’t want to be the ‘bad girl’ because we explained to her ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ off of that situation. So she’s always asking me that, and I hate that. I tell her, 'You don’t have to ask that all the time, you’re a good girl, we just have bad moments and things like that, 'You don’t go out and hurt people.'"
I-Team Series | State of Hate
Thinking about his family and others is what motivated Thomas to press charges that night.
"The officers were just letting me know, like, if you don’t press charges, he’s out of jail tomorrow, and he can do this to someone else," Thomas said.
This case fits the profile of the most common hate crimes in Florida as of 2020.
According to FBI data, the most common bias in a Florida hate crime is race, specifically anti-Black or anti-African American. The most common offense is assault, and the location is typically a highway/alley/street/sidewalk. The victim is most often an individual rather than a business or religious organization, and the offender is typically white.
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“Just from my personal experience, they’re middle-aged, usually Caucasian, perpetrators," FBI Special Agent Susana Mapu told the I-Team.
That experience is backed up by federal data, showing offenders across the U.S. are predominantly white.
Mapu said hate crimes are important to investigate because "It doesn't just affect one person. When a crime is committed, it affects an entire community.”
In an affidavit, a Pinellas County Sheriff's deputy wrote that Leahy told deputies that he "got out, threw the Nazi salute, and wanted to fight a random colored person."
Police body camera video showed Leahy telling a deputy, “He started attacking me like some random like, like criminal, you know, negro, you know what I’m saying, like I don’t know what, you know."
He went on to say, “These guys are animals, you know what I’m saying? You have to maintain these people. Keep them in their areas.”
Minutes later, Leahy was handcuffed.
"That’s [expletive] up, bro," Leahy said. "I'm the victim."
“Oh no, you’re not," the deputy can be heard saying on body camera video.
The I-Team obtained court records revealing a deputy wrote that Leahy then said he "wanted to conduct a mass shooting and kill sixty to seventy people, by shooting them in the face. Jordan then stated he would conduct the mass shooting and then take his own life by shooting himself in the throat."
Jordan stated, 'Do you know how [expletive] amazing that would feel? That would feel so much more fulfilling than anything in this life at all, referring to conducting a mass shooting. Jordan would continue to state he is a sheltered white suburban male and society would never suspect him of a mass shooting, then explaining it would be so easy for him to execute others and people needed to be worried about the sheltered white person."
The deputy then wrote, "Multiple times during my contact with Jordan, he would make racial slurs towards African-American individuals."
Leahy, a convicted felon, failed a sobriety test and was detained under the Baker Act. The offense report from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office stated the Baker Act was completed "due to Jordan's statements wishing he was killed by the victim and that he wanted to conduct a mass shooting."
A year later, in federal court, a jury found Leahy guilty of a racially-motivated attack.
Tampa jury convicts local man of federal hate crime for attacking Black man driving with his family
Leahy was sentenced Monday to 30 months in prison for the crime. With the time he's already served, six months, he will spend the next 24 months in federal prison. (Read the prosecution and defense sentencing memorandums)
Talking about the rise in hate crimes, Thomas said, “You would think that in this day and time that it would be nonexistent, but it’s still very much alive."
If you are a witness or victim of a hate crime or incident, please contact your local law enforcement or report it to the FBI by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI or submitting a tip at tips.fbi.gov.
