According to prosecutors, the men gathered at a “makeshift outdoor clubhouse” to watch the election results on the Internet. Shortly after learning that Mr. Obama had won, they and a fourth man “decided to find African-Americans to assault in retaliation for an African-American man becoming president,” the prosecution papers said.
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Prosecutors said that Mr. Nicoletti drove the group to the Park Hill neighborhood, which has a large black population, and that the four men got out of the car to assault Mr. Kamara, using a metal pipe and a collapsible police baton. Mr. Kamara said that his attackers shouted “Obama!”
The group then carried out a series of other assaults, the statement said: They pushed a black man in Port Richmond to the ground; accosted a Latino man and demanded to know for whom he had voted; and yelled profanities about Mr. Obama as they drove past black people at a hair salon.
They then spotted a man, Ronald Forte, in a hooded sweatshirt, on Blackford Avenue. Believing that the man was black, the group decided that one of them would hit him with the baton, prosecutors said. Instead, Mr. Nicoletti “decided to hit him with the car,” and Mr. Forte, 38, was thrown onto the hood and into the windshield, shattering it.
