Mother, daughter plead guilty to civil rights violation in noose incident - baltimoresun.com: A mother and daughter from Middle River have pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation for their involvement in an incident in 2010 in which a dead raccoon was hung by a noose from an African family's Middle River porch, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Dena Whedlee, 42, and her daughter Brittany Whedlee, 20, admitted to encouraging their co-conspirators — including Billy Ray Pratt, 24, of Halethorpe, and Joshua Wall, 20, of Essex — to hang the raccoon from the family's porch after a boy in the family got into a fight with Dena Whedlee's son, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein.
The women "understood and discussed the racial significance of using a raccoon, acknowledging that the term 'coon' is a derogatory term for black people," and discussed how hanging the animal would symbolize hanging a black person, prosecutors said.
