Two families have received $ 750,000 after a jury ruled that the owner of a Virginia camp discriminated They because one of the campers was a black man.
Amanda Amanda Mills and Angela Smith had planned a joint family camp trip to Lazy Cove Campground in June 2020. Smith, which is white, brought her husband, Damien Smith, who is black, and her 8 -year -old son to join Mills’s family for the getaway.
His plans took a turn after receiving a phone call from the owner of the camp, Regina Turner. According to a complaint presented to the Virginia Justa Housing Board, reported by the Washington Post, Turner told Mills: “You did not tell me that your friend’s husband is black.”
“If I had known, I would not have rented the lot. I saw the son, but I thought everyone makes a mistake,” he said, according to the complaint.
According to judicial documents, Turner supposedly told another tenant in the camp that he wanted to wait until his lease ended instead of advancing with the eviction.
“I can’t make them move now because if I give both notices in motion now, they could take my park. I am smart, you know, and I have to use my head,” according to judicial documents.
The Office of the Attorney General of Virginia and the Fair Housing Board of Virginia filed a civil lawsuit against Turner for a position to refuse to rent and two charges of discrimination. The demand turned out that both families received $ 100,000 each for their losses.
The jury also granted an additional $ 550,000 in punitive damage, according to a press release by Attorney General Jason Miyares on Thursday.
“It was like a sigh of relief, but at the same time, I’m still angry because we should never have had to go through this,” said Damien Smith to the post. “It was 2020 at that time, and somehow we are still being judged by the color of our skin versus the type of person we are.”
Attorney General Miyares said that his office is “pleased by the jury’s verdict, and I am immensely proud of my civil rights unit. Franklin County people have spoken: Smith Mountain Lake is for all.”
The verdict of $ 750,000 more than triples the old largest victory of fair housing in the state, which was a sentence of $ 200,000 in a case of sexual harassment of 2011, Miyares said.
Holland Perdue, lawyer from Turner and mayor of Rocky Mount, presented a motion to cancel the jury verdict and the next appearance in the Court is scheduled for April 8, according to the post.
Perdue did not immediately respond to a request for comments from NBC News. Turner told the post that he never evicted families and, despite the fact that his late husband refused to rent black people, the camp now accepts “all kinds of people.”
She said she called Mills about Damien Smith because she felt “betrayed” not knowing that it was black.
