After a radio caller made him aware of the extremely disturbing story of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tenn., Glenn Beck researched the case and was horrified at what he found.
Though the details are hard to hear, Beck told the couple’s story in excruciating detail during his show on TheBlaze TV Tuesday. The killings occurred in 2007; however, Beck says the media failed to give the case adequate coverage due to special interests or negligence.
Newsom, 23, was a standout baseball player who was working as a carpenter. Christian was a 21-year-old student at the University of Tennessee. The happy couple had been dating for a couple months.
On January 6, 2007, the couple made plans to watch a movie at a friend’s apartment, but they never made it. They would never be seen alive again.
When Christian didn’t show up for work the next morning, family members immediately grew worried and reported them missing, Beck explained.
“It turns out that the couple had made it to dinner, but when they arrived at the apartment complex where Christian’s best friends lived, they were carjacked by multiple assailants,” he said. “What followed was one of the most heinous, gruesome, senseless hate crimes, ever.”
It was at this point in the program that Beck advised parents to have their children leave the room or pause the show and watch it at a later time due to the graphic details of the story.
Newsom was gagged with a sock in his mouth, his ankles were bound with his own belt, his hands were tied behind his back, his face was covered with a bandana and his head covered with a sweatshirt that his five assailants had tied around his neck with shoestrings.
He was then violently raped with an object and beaten.
“One can only imagine the horror Christopher experienced as he was then forced to walk barefoot to the nearby railroad tracks, where he was shot in the neck in the back,” Beck said solemnly. “But the shots didn’t kill him — he fell to the ground and was paralyzed.”
“That’s when the assailants stood over him, placed the gun against his head and fired, killing him execution style,” he added. Newsom was shot a total of three times.
But not even that was enough. The attackers then poured gasoline on his body and set him on fire
Unfortunately, the horror of this tragic story is not over. Beck went on to speak of what also happened to Christian on that night.
The woman was forced into a back room of the house where she was hog-tied with a strips of fabric from a bedding set. She was brutally raped “in every possible way imaginable” for several hours as the assailants beat her viciously with several objects, including a broken chair leg.
By the time Christian was taken into the living room, the five attackers realized they had left their DNA on their victim. In an attempt to cover their tracks, they poured bleach down her throat and on her body before they wrapped her body in black garbage bags and covered her head in a plastic grocery bag.
“She was then placed in a garbage can in the kitchen of the house — all of this while she was still alive,” Beck noted.
“Channon Christian’s last minutes on earth were spent slowly suffocating in a garbage can after she had been savagely beaten and raped for hours,” he added.
Beck slammed “so-called” civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for failing to demand justice in the brutal case. He criticized the media just as harshly for failing to give the story the coverage it deserved.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of justice for the family of the victims has also been elusive.
All five suspects in the case had been charged and convicted for the crime when it was discovered that the judge had a drug addiction, allowing the killers to take advantage of the justice system.
“All but one has been repeatedly pursuing retrials and appeals,” Beck explained. “The lone female attacker had her sentence reduced by a third.”
Beck continued: “This miscarriage of justice is forcing the family to live this horror over and over and over again each time they are dragged back into a court battle.”
Real “social justice,” the host added, will only be achieved when justice is truly blind.
The five attackers are Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd. All of the previous state convictions, except for Coleman’s, were allowed to stand and the defendants remain in prison pending appeals. Coleman had her sentence reduced by a third after a retrial.
