On Thursday's At This Hour on CNN, Symone Sanders joined Angela Rye in the list of liberal CNN political commentators who have repeated a discredited myth that the gunman in the Charleston church massacre, Dylann Roof, was given special treatment by police before being incarcerated.
During a debate over President Donald Trump's reaction to the police killings of Alton Sterling and Stephon Clark, Sanders claimed that police actually took Roof on a trip to Burger King to eat before taking him to jail in spite of his having murdered nine people. Sanders: "Dylann Roof, who walked into a church and shot nine people, he was taken into custody alive and then was taken to Burger King to get a burger before they took him to jail."
As former Westchester County executive Rob Astorino argued that the fact that Sterling had illegal drugs in his system helped factor into the decision not to charge the Baton Rouge police officers who shot him while he resisted arrest, Sanders jumped in: "Okay, pardon me. Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, are we really going to ... I really think it's problematic here when we start to demonize the victims in these cases."
She soon cited the debunked myth of Roof as evidence of special treatment received by white criminals as she soon added:
I'm not going it sit here and let you say that Alton Sterling was basically a criminal that was reaching for his gun and deserved to get shot because, guess what, the young man that shot and killed 17 people on a high school campus the other day, he was taken into custody alive. You know, Dylann Roof, who walked into a church and shot nine people, he was taken into custody alive and then was taken to Burger King to get a burger before they took him to jail.
So the problem here is, it seems at though when we have suspects or people who are engaged in situations with police officers that are a little bit more melanated than some of our counterparts, they seem to not make it out of the situations alive.
On Tuesday, Rye also repeated the claim about Burger King as she debated conservative CNN political commentator Ben Ferguson on the Alton Sterling case.
But, as documented by Snopes, Roof was not taken to Burger King by police. He was simply supplied with food from Burger King while he awaited transfer to a larger jail because the small jail where he was initially incarcerated did not have the facilities to supply with him in-house food, and the restaurant was nearby. If the liberals want to argue that prisoners should be denied food, that would make an interesting segment.
