The racist who fatally drove a sword through 66-year-old Timothy Caughman said Sunday he hoped the attack would stop white women from entering relationships with black men.
In an exclusive Rikers Island interview with the Daily News, James Jackson, 28, offered a window into his deranged, hate-filled psyche.
He shared details about his upbringing with “typical liberal” parents, his wishes to have shed more African-American blood, and his fear of being killed in custody now that he is being held in a jail with a largely minority inmate population and staff.
During the disturbing sitdown, Johnson was at times self-aggrandizing, boasting of his white supremacy without shame. In other moments, he appeared dejected by society’s rejection of his violent, racist message — which echoed another notorious racist killer, South Carolina church gunman Dylann Roof.
Most chillingly, Jackson said he had traveled to New York from Baltimore intending to kill numerous black men, imagining that the bloodshed would deter white women from interracial relationships. “‘Well, if that guy feels so strongly about it, maybe I shouldn’t do it,'” he said, imagining how he wanted a white woman to think.
Jackson said he grew up in an “almost all-white” area outside of Baltimore. “My family is as liberal as they come … typical liberal Democrats,” he said.
His grandfather in Louisiana was “very pro-integration” and had crosses burned on his lawn, he said.
Jackson said he had his first racist thoughts when he was just 3. As he grew older, he only shared his views with “like-minded people” online, he said. He mentioned the website Daily Stormer — which was also frequented by Roof, who was sentenced to death for killing nine black worshipers in 2015.
“The white race is being eroded. … No one cares about you. The Chinese don’t care about you, the blacks don’t care about you,” he said.
Jackson graduated in 2007 from a prestigious Quaker school, Friends School of Baltimore, but its message of peace didn’t take.
“I guess it’s like anything — if something gets pushed on you too much, you reject it,” he said.
In 2008, Jackson said, he voted for Barack Obama for President, one of the few people of mixed race he said he could respect. “I couldn’t let Palin get in there. She’s stupid,” he said, referencing then-Republican candidate for vice president Sarah Palin.
In 2009, he joined the Army and served as a military intelligence analyst in Kabul. He loved the “sense of mission” and embraced a vision of the U.S. as an imperialist power.
He was discharged in 2012 after winning several awards.
The military training, he said, helped him plan to kill black men. “I had been thinking about it for a long time, for the past couple of years,” he said. “I figured I would end up getting shot by police, kill myself, or end up in jail.”
His most recent address was in Hampden, a northern Baltimore neighborhood that is 78% white in a city that is 70% nonwhite.
On March 17, he took a bus from Baltimore to New York and got a room in the Hotel Times Square. He’d chosen the area to maximize his media exposure, police sources said.
Sources said he stalked one black man last Monday but got “spooked” and turned his attention to Caughman. The bottle collector from Jamaica, Queens, was well-liked by neighbors and delighted in taking pictures of himself with celebrities.
At 11:30 p.m. at 36th St. and Ninth Ave., Jackson plunged a sword with an 18-inch blade into Caughman’s chest.
“I figured they were fatal blows,” Jackson said.
Caughman died at Bellevue Hospital.
Jackson had a sick regret about his victim, who was chosen at random. “I didn’t know he was elderly,” he said. He would have rather killed “a young thug” or “a successful older black man with blonds … people you see in Midtown. These younger guys that put white girls on the wrong path.
Jackson said he’d intended for the killing to be “a practice run” — the first step in a larger plan with many more casualties.
But his bloodlust diminished after the killing. “I got depressed. …I saw it was too late. It’s irreversible,” he said, adding, “I didn’t want to put my family through any more pain.”
And what of the white women repulsed by his violent, hateful ideology? “That’s the problem,” he said.
He turned himself in to police in Times Square on Wednesday. He is charged with murder as a hate crime.
He didn’t understand how the charge applied to him.
“I don’t hate anyone I don’t think is on my level,” he said.
Mayor de Blasio called the attack “domestic, racist terrorism.”
Life at Rikers Island has been a real eyeopener for Jackson. The inmate population is 55% black, and Correction Department staff is 65% black. “I thought it would be 40% white, 40% black, 20% Hispanic … and all the guards, I didn’t expect so many would be black,” he said.
He is in protective custody, watching and reading news as much as 10 hours a day.
“It’s like every other commercial in the past few years has a mixed-race couple in it,” he said.
He said he had received about 50 death threats while at the Manhattan Detention Complex.
“I think I’m going to die here,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t blame them, I’d feel the same if I were in their shoes.”
Jackson had one last piece of advice for a News reporter: have children. “Good white women should have as many children as possible,” he said, defining “good” as “smart, sane women.”
His solution for how those women support themselves was to “go on welfare.”
His ideal society was “1950s America.”
A News reporter pointed out that it is 2017. “I know. I’m too late. We’re screwed,” Jackson said.
