San Jose police recently made six arrests for related hate crime robberies and attacks against Asian American women — but what the primary suspect admitted stunned prosecutors, KGO-TV reported.
What are the details?
Anthony Robinson — who faces up to 95 years in jail — targeted multiple Asian women daily, the station said, and court documents show he deliberately targeted Asian victims based on his prejudiced assumption that they don’t believe in bank accounts.
“The callousness of these crimes we could not get past … you can dehumanize the population literally by treating them as storefronts instead of people,” Supervising Deputy District Attorney of Santa Clara County Marisa McKeown told KGO.
Authorities said Robinson, 24, and the other five suspects worked together on more than 70 incidents of robbery, theft, and burglary from October 2020 to September 2021, the San Jose Mercury News said.
The Mercury News reported that, along with Robinson who hails from Stockton, the police released the names of the other suspects: 27-year-old Cameron Alonzo Moody of East Palo Alto, 23-year-old Derje Damond Blanks of San Jose, 24-year-old Hassani Burleson Ramsey of Oakland, 21-year-old Clarence Jackson of East Palo Alto, and 21-year-old Malik Short of Tracy.
All six men were also charged with hate crime enhancements by the county D.A.’s office, the paper added.
McKeown also explained to KGO why three of the men — Short, Ramsey, and Blanks — were released from custody: “Not every member of this criminal group had an equal role. So Anthony Robinson quite clearly was engaged in a voluminous number of incidents, but some other individuals who were involved may have participated in only one or a few incidents, and therefore they stand in very different shoes in terms of the charging decision.”
Anything else?
The station said that additional charges for all six men will soon be announced, and McKeown said the investigation is far from complete, noting dozens more unsolved incidents.