Mohammed Qayoumi, the San Jose State University President has suspended a fourth student, an 18-year-old from Los Angeles, in connection with the harassment of an African-American roommate.
Three white students - Logan Beaschler and Collin Warren, both 18, and 19-year-old Joseph Bomgardner, were suspended Thursday after being charged with misdemeanor hate crime and battery charges.
The freshman students have been charged for bullying their black roommate, between August and mid-October, by hanging a Confederate Flag in their four-bedroom dormitory suite, barricading the victim in his room, chaining a bike lock around his neck and claiming to have lost the key, and calling him names from the slavery era, according to a police report, Fox News reports.
If convicted, the students face a maximum of a year in county jail. The fourth suspended student has not yet been named or identified because he was a juvenile at the time of the alleged crime.
The victim's family said that they are 'deeply disturbed by the horrific behavior that have taken place against our son.' The student continues to attend school.
Warren Nance, vice president of Student Affairs described the hate crime incident against the 18-year-old African-American roommate as 'shocking and outrageous.'
"The San Jose State University incident highlights a disturbing pattern of ignorance and intolerance... Students, administrators and communities must understand that hateful actions, language and symbols...have no place in centers of learning or anywhere else in America today," the Southern Poverty Law Center, a major civil rights group based out of Alabama, said, NBC Bay Area reports.
The racial incident in the Campus Village dorm suite has annoyed many students in the African-American community.
"You've been telling us for years that things are fine," student Gary Daniels, 21, said angrily. "But this is a hostile environment for black students."
For the second consecutive day, students from the Black Student Union rallied in front of Tommie Smith and John Carlos' statutes in the center of the campus.
This is not the first such incident to have occurred on campus. San Jose State student Ashley McPherson claims that she was once a victim of racial hazing. Even though she reported it, no disciplinary actions was taken against the perpetrators.
"I don't know which one did it, but one of them put dish soap in my juice, and this was after us having meetings with the ROC and the RA's to address the situations that were going on," McPherson said. "And so after that the solution was to move me to a different room," abc local reports.
