Trial underway for 2013 Mother's Day beating of white husband and wife in NBR

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A white St. Francisville man testified Tuesday that Donald Ray Dickerson, a black convicted felon, shoved him for no apparent reason at a north Baton Rouge gas station on Mother’s Day 2013 and told him he was in the “wrong neighborhood” before knocking him unconscious while his wife and two young daughters looked on in horror.

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David Ray III testified he and his family had spent a perfect Mother’s Day in Baton Rouge and were on their way back to their St. Francisville home that night when he stopped for gas at Stadium Chevron on Scenic Highway at the foot of Plank Road.

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The lawyer, Shalita Sanders, told jurors that skin color had nothing to do with the May 12, 2013, altercation. “Mr. Dickerson didn’t go to that gas station intending to pick on anybody,” she said. Ray, according to a supplemental police report, told an officer from his hospital bed that his assailant called him a “white boy.” But Sanders said in her opening statement that her client did not target Ray that night and that a comment about the pink shirt Ray was wearing apparently triggered the altercation. “He’s not the malicious person they want you to believe he is,” she said of Dickerson.

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Neither state nor federal authorities lodged hate-crimes charges against Dickerson. East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III has said the Ray family did not wish for such charges to be pursued. Moore also said Dickerson faces a much stiffer sentence under Louisiana’s habitual offender law if he is convicted in the Ray case. With prior convictions for armed robbery, carnal knowledge of a juvenile and purse snatching, Dickerson could be sentenced to life in prison if he’s found guilty of second-degree battery.

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