A Chicago thug who in 2017 tortured a disabled teen while his friend gleefully streamed it live on social media — explicitly saying it was because they hated whites and Donald Trump — was released from prison this week, having served less than seven years of his eight-year hate-crime sentence.
Jordan Hill left the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections on Tuesday, according to records obtained by The Daily Wire. In January 2017, Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, and Brittany and Tanishia Covington kidnapped a mentally disabled 18-year-old and laughed as they tortured him, including making him drink out of a toilet.
Hill used a stolen van to kidnap the victim and held him in captivity there for three days before driving him to the Covingtons’ apartment, where they tied him up.
They beat him and cut out part of his scalp with a knife, screaming “f*** white people” and forcing their victim to say “F*** Trump” and “I love black people.” Then they demanded a ransom from their victim’s mother. On January 3, police found the victim wandering outside “bloodied” and “battered.”
Then-President Barack Obama commented on the Black Lives Matter-era anti-white torture, saying, “What we have seen as surfacing, I think, are a lot of problems that have been there a long time … Whether it’s tensions between police and communities, (or) hate crimes of the despicable sort that has just now recently surfaced on Facebook.”
“They do demonstrate a level of depravity that is an outrage to a lot of Americans,” then-White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Hill was 18 and knew the victim, who was the same age, from school. Cooper and Brittany Covington were also 18 while her sister Tanishia was 24.
Even though all four suspects had previous run-ins with the law, Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks let the younger Covington off without any jail time, dropping charges of kidnapping in exchange for her pleading guilty to a hate crime, intimidation, and battery and accepting four years’ probation.
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The elder Covington was sentenced to three years in prison. Hooks ordered her to directly apologize to her mentally disabled victim, and he whispered “it’s alright.”
Cooper faced more than 50 felony counts, but pleaded guilty to just two, hate crime and kidnapping, and was sentenced to seven years in prison in July 2018. He was released in November 2022.
Hill was also initially charged with more than 50 crimes and faced up to 30 years in prison, but accepted a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to only two crimes.
At sentencing, Judge Hooks “directed Hill to look at paintings and photographs of civil rights leaders hanging on the walls of his courtrooms, and shook his head as Hill was unable to identify portraits of Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, among others,” as the Chicago Sun-Times reported at the time.
“Every time you take an act like this… terrible act on this young man who could not defend himself, you spit on the graves of all of the people on these walls,” he said.
Hill was sentenced to eight years in prison in July 2018. But he was released on parole on Tuesday after less than seven years, beginning from his initial arrest, records show.
The incident, recorded by one of the culprits and streamed to Facebook Live as they reveled in their cruelty, was one of the most clear-cut and vicious examples of a racially motivated hate crime in a country that has devoted significant energy calling for severe punishment for those who committed less severe, real or imagined hate crimes, such as the one alleged by Jussie Smollett.
Yet Hill’s ultimate punishment is far more lenient than those in other cases. Federal prosecutors have sought long sentences for those accused of trespassing in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Jacob Chansley, the “Qanon Shaman,” received almost 4 years in prison after police escorted him on a tour of the Capitol. This week, prosecutors sought eight years in prison for a mother of eight with an otherwise clean record who smashed a window, and she was sentenced to nearly five years. Also this week, Douglas Mackay was sentenced to seven months in prison for posting a meme about Hillary Clinton.