Coeur d'Alene prosecutor: No charges in racial incident involving University of Utah basketball team
Tony Stewart, secretary of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, addresses the media on March 26 during a press conference to address a reported racial incident in downtown Coeur d'Alene on March 21.
BILL BULEY/Press file
COEUR d'ALENE — There will not be criminal charges filed in connection to a reported racial incident that received national attention in March, according to the city's chief deputy city attorney on Monday.
"In short, I cannot find probable cause that Anthony Myers’s conduct — shouting out of a moving vehicle at a group of people — constituted either Disturbing the Peace under state law or Disorderly Conduct under the CDA Municipal Code. Instead, what has been clear from the very outset of this incident is that it was not when or where or how Mr. Myers made the grotesque racial statement that caused the justifiable outrage in this case; it was the grotesque racial statement itself," wrote Ryan S. Hunter in a complaint review charging decision dated May 3.
A March 21 racial incident was reported in downtown Coeur d’Alene involving the University of Utah's women's basketball team and others with them. People in trucks reportedly revved engines and shouted racial slurs at the group after they visited a Sherman Avenue restaurant.
A few days later, city leaders held a press conference and apologized. The event received national media coverage.
Police later said that audio and video recordings they reviewed corroborated reports of what happened, and they were looking for the driver of a silver sedan in connection to the incident.
According to Hunter's report, the Coeur d'Alene Police Department’s "subsequent exhaustive investigation determined the identities of the four occupants of the silver passenger car and, ultimately, confirmed that one of the individuals in that vehicle, Anthony Richard Myers, an 18-year-old student at Post Falls High School, made the offensive statement containing the racial slur, to which he subsequently confessed during interviews with law enforcement.
"Our office shares in the outrage sparked by Anthony Myers’s abhorrently racist and misogynistic statement, and we join in unequivocally condemning that statement and the use of a racial slur in this case, or in any circumstance. However, that cannot, under current law, form the basis for criminal prosecution in this case," Hunter wrote.