A white South Carolina woman won’t stand trial for charges filed in June, after a viral video showed her shrieking at and striking a black fifteen-year-old boy whom she deemed unwelcome at her suburban pool. Stephanie Sebby-Strempel, 38, of Summerville, pleaded guilty to third-degree misdemeanor assault for the attack on Darshaun “DJ” RocQuemore Simmons at the Reminisce community pool, where DJ and two other friends were invited guests. Her sentence? A paltry $1,000 fine, with ten days to pay it.
Sebby-Strempel, of course, faced other punishment for her foul behavior, which included racial slurs and other insults lobbed at not just DJ, but two of his unnamed friends. She lost her job at a multi-level marketing company, such as it was. Since she’s now internet-famous for bigotry and violence, her uncommon name will forever be linked to both her mugshot and coverage of this foul act of racism—not to mention her subsequent biting attack on the officers who came to arrest her.
But what about offline consequences, out of the courts and in her own neighborhood? The blind hatred and privilege, as well as the arrogance and utter disrespect required to fuel such an attack might seem unusual to many. But, as the Washington Post reports, in this fast-growing Charleston suburb in a county of 156,000, the necessary mindsets are not unusual at all. According to the must-read in-depth journey into the Reminisce subdivision, and Summerville itself, published in September, Sebby-Strempel actually didn’t face much shaming around her neighborhood. Instead, many of the locals took her side.
It’s unsurprising when one remembers that not one adult at the pool stopped Sebby-Strempel’s violent attack on three teenaged boys. Not a single one. And in the Reminisce subdivision homeowners association’s Facebook group, WaPo reports, many homeowners actually defended her actions, and pilloried the boys.
Many of the white residents assumed that the teens bore some responsibility for provoking Strempel.
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The sentiment exasperated the black residents on the page, who saw in the comments a tendency among whites to portray all African American boys as menacing.
The viral video was repeatedly posted in the HOA Facebook group by black residents, and repeatedly removed by moderators. To the residents of color, it appeared that their white neighbors weren’t interested in exploring the bigotry that led to Sebby-Strempel’s attack on the boys. In fact, the incident didn’t really matter much to the city’s white residents in general, at least not in the way one would think.
Instead, many white residents fretted about the effect the video might have on their property values and complained about the reporters who were converging on their neighborhood.
The white residents managed to center themselves in the controversy, though not in a “let’s confront our bigotry” kind of way. After all, this is a precinct that voted by roughly two-thirds for Donald Trump, who is not known for addressing his own biases; these residents learned from the master of deflection.
For many whites in the subdivision, any suggestion that race had played a role in the incident was offensive. Such charges were one piece of a broader effort by black activists, liberals and the “fake news” media to cry racism to gain advantage, they suggested, often at their expense.
By September, the black residents of the area seemed resigned to their neighbors’ acceptance of the bias (and blindness to it) that led Sebby-Strempel to assume that DJ and his friends couldn’t possibly have been invited to the pool and tell them that they “didn’t belong.”
In the Reminisce subdivision, black and white residents have given up on reaching an understanding about the pool incident or other issues that touch on race. The tensions dredged up by the pool video, though, still rumble beneath the surface.
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Jovan Hyman and his wife similarly avoided talking about the pool video with white neighbors ... “If there was an open discussion, it would shine a light on racist neighbors,” Hyman’s wife, Tameka, said. “I’d rather not know — especially if it’s someone living this close.”
Hyman, who had seen his child-hitting neighbor around, but never spoken to her, attempted to discuss the video with Sebby-Strempel before it went viral. At the time, she denied hitting DJ, despite it being caught on camera, and insisted she was “helping” the boys by advising them to leave—before someone else called the police on them.
The charges Sebby-Strempel faced for biting the police officers sent to arrest her, by the bye, appear to have been dismissed.
WaPo checked in with DJ and his friends in September. Scars heal; they’ve returned to their normal lives, doing normal teenage things. And DJ’s family, who attended Sebby-Strempel’s plea hearing on Monday, told local media that they consider the $1,000 fine to be a fair punishment.