Beyond Superwomen: Justice for Black Women Too

On June 18, 2007, Tommy Poindexter coaxed a woman out of her apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida by telling her that her car had a flat. Then he and nine other young blackmen forced her back into her home in the Dunbar Village public housing community, where they not only robbed her but engaged in three hours of rape, beatings, and torture. The female victim, a Haitian immigrant, was raped vaginally, orally, and anally, sometimes with bottles or a firearm, while they beat her twelve-year-old son in another room. In an effort to cover up their crimes, they told both the woman and her son to clean off and then forced the mother and son to have sex with each other. Finally, the assailants poured alcohol into the woman’s anus, ammonia on both her and her son’s eyes, stuffed a bar of soap into the woman’s vagina, and tried to light the mother and child on fire as they lay naked in a bathtub.