A Louisiana man was charged with a slew of hate crime and aggravated assault charges after a viral video showed him walking onto a Black man’s property, shouting threats, then firing his rifle directly at the man filming him.
The video shows 56-year-old Robert Ray Fortenberry parking on the street in front of a home in Tallulah, Louisiana, then exiting his vehicle to confront one of his neighbors.
According to police, Fortenberry hit one of his neighbors’ cars, fled the scene, then returned in a different vehicle.
The two-minute video shows the moments he returned to complain to a neighbor about the car he had struck. It’s unknown whether the car Fortenberry hit belongs to the person he confronted in the video.
“The motherf***** ain’t got to park in the middle of the road,” Fortenberry says as he walks onto his neighbor’s driveway.
The man filming is heard politely and repeatedly asking Fortenberry to get off his property and get back in his car.
“Could you please get out of the yard and back in your vehicle?” the man asks Fortenberry.
Fortenberry’s responses are hard to make out as he talks from afar, but one of the residents witnessing the encounter is heard shouting that one of his statements “was a threat.”
“It is what it is. Evidently, I ain’t scared of y’all. I mean, I love Black people,” Fortenberry says, adding that he’s “a nice guy.”
The man Fortenberry confronts tells Fortenberry he’s trespassing and repeats his request for him to leave.
Then, Fortenberry turns around and walks back to his car as if he’s complying with the request to leave peacefully.
But the confrontation swiftly escalates to violence when Fortenberry retrieves an assault rifle from his car, turns right back around, and walks back.
“Let me tell you something. I’m sick of this s***,” Fortenberry says before firing off one shot at the cameraman, causing him to duck and pull out his own handgun.
“Get in the house! You hear me!” Fortenberry shouts. “I ain’t putting up with it no more. You motherf*****s! You keep filming me all you want to … you gonna get one in your f***ing head.”
The video ends after showing Fortenberry walking back to his car and driving off, while the cameraman says, “He’s going to jail.”
The video garnered more than four million views on Facebook.
According to the Vicksburg Daily News, local law enforcement arrested Fortenberry at his home and seized his rifle. Authorities charged him with eight counts of aggravated assault, eight counts of illegal use of a firearm, eight counts of a hate crime, and terrorism.
Tallulah Police Chief Buster McCoy said that when Fortenberry reentered the property with the weapon, he “continued to threaten bodily harm while pointing the assault rifle at the individuals.”
His bond was set at $215,000.
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