A Maine man was sentenced this week to three years in prison for assaulting black men without provocation, according to federal authorities.
Dusty Leo, 30, of Biddeford, Maine, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit a hate crime and of actually committing a hate crime on Feb. 25, 2020.
Following a three-day trial in March 2020, a jury convicted Leo’s co-conspirator and uncle, Maurice Diggins, of conspiring to commit and committing a series of racially motivated assaults against Black men in Maine.
For his convictions, Diggins was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
“The crimes committed by Mr. Leo and his co-conspirator injured and traumatized their victims, and also traumatized the communities in which they occurred,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Donald E. Clark for the District of Maine. “No one should be targeted for violence because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity. Crimes like this tear at the very fabric of our society. This prosecution makes clear that individuals who commit hate-motivated crimes will be made to pay for their actions. I am proud of the investigators and prosecutors who tirelessly pursued this case, and so appreciative of the victims, who courageously confronted Mr. Leo’s co-defendant at trial.”
According to Leo’s guilty plea and evidence presented at Diggins’s trial, on April 15, 2018, Diggins attacked a Sudanese man without provocation outside of a bar in Portland, Maine.
The assault, which broke the victim’s jaw, was immediately followed by an attack on another Black man who was standing on the street nearby.
In a second incident, which occurred approximately an hour later and approximately 20 miles away in Biddeford, co-conspirators Diggins and Leo drove in Leo’s truck into a parking lot of a convenience store, where Diggins got out of the truck and approached a Black man who was walking toward the store’s entrance.
Diggins directed a racial slur at the man and distracted him while Leo got out of the truck and sucker-punched the victim in the jaw, knocking him to the ground. The unprovoked attack broke the victim’s jaw in several places.
The Biddeford Police Department and the FBI investigated the case.