Edward Halstead Locust Grove, Virginia man arrested after falsely claiming 3 black men assaulted him – only for police to determine he’d been the aggressor.
A white Virginia man has been arrested after calling police to falsely report he’d been assaulted by three ‘African American men’ only for cops to say he turned out to be the aggressor and that the attack was perpetrated because the victims are black.
Authorities responded to a call from Edward Halstead, 53, in Lake of the Woods, Locust Grove on Tuesday at 7.15pm.
But after they ‘interviewed several people’ they ‘determined that the caller was in fact the perpetrator’.
‘It appears based on the interviews, that the perpetrator of the crimes did so because of the race of the victims,’ the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.
Sheriff Mark Amos confirmed the assaults happened in a common area WSET reports.
Halstead was booked into Central Virginia Regional Jail on charges including attempted strangulation and three counts of felonious assault and battery due to the victim’s race. One of the charges is listed as a class 6 felony hate crime.
It was not immediately clear if Halstead had a lawyer who could comment on his behalf.
