White Jacksonville man gets prison for hate crime threats with shotgun against 2 Black women

A white Jacksonville man who shouted racial slurs and threatened two Black women with a shotgun has been sentenced to five years in prison for committing federal hate crimes.

Frederick Eugene Pierallini III, who turns 28 on Saturday, pleaded guilty last summer to two crimes that together could have put him behind bars for as much as 20 years.

“The defendant is being held accountable for targeting two Black women with a gun on two separate days because of their race,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in written remarks. “No one in this country should have to live in fear that when they use public spaces or work at their job, they risk attack by someone who hates them because of the color of their skin.”

The abstract-sounding crimes Pierallini was convicted of happened in routine, everyday settings — a Westside convenience store and the street outside his Southside apartment — and at first triggered an attempted-murder charge in state court.

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Pierallini had tried to buy a Slim Jim and a cheese stick inside Daily's Place at 620 S. Chaffee Road and confronted a Black woman working behind the counter after a machine declined the card he used to pay, according to court records about the September 2022 incidents.

He told the woman she didn’t know how to do her job, called her a racial slur several times and walked out, but was still outside at his truck when she stepped outside to speak to coworkers, records said. Calling her the slur again, he retrieved a shotgun from the truck and cocked it before the woman ran inside and called police and he left, the records said.

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Two days later, Pierallini was working on his truck outside his Lakewood-area apartment and saw a Black 61-year-old woman with a walker waiting for the nearby CubeSmart storage business to open.

“You can’t be sitting over here,” he told the woman, using the same slur towards her and retrieving a shotgun he fired while the woman was on the phone with a police dispatcher. Pierallini said he fired into the air, but the woman said he fired at her. She was hurt by falling to the ground for safety, according to court records.

Pierallini’s attorney argued his client’s life of traumas and mental health problems had created a “diminished mental capacity” that should justify a less-severe penalty than the 51-to-63 months term recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.

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But Assistant U.S. Attorney Ashley Washington argued the crime justified a penalty like the 60-month sentence U.S. District Court Chief Judge Timothy Corrigan ordered Wednesday.

“Both women legitimately feared that the defendant would kill them,” Washington wrote in a sentencing memo. She argued crimes like that "traumatize not only the targeted victims but the Black community as a whole. These crimes instill fear that other members cold be targeted because of the color of their skin."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville man gets 5-year sentence for shotgun threats to Black women