NEW YORK (AP) — A white supremacist accused of stabbing a black man to death with a sword on a New York City street told police he wanted to purge the Earth of black people.
According to his videotaped confession, James Harris Jackson told investigators after his arrest in the March 20, 2017, stabbing death of Timothy Caughman that black people were "inferior" and should be "exterminated."
"I think we should just preserve the best people and get rid of all the dead weight," Jackson said in the video played at a pretrial hearing in Manhattan on Tuesday. "In my opinion, blacks are inferior people."
Later in the interview, he added, "I think they need to be exterminated," the New York Post reported.
Jackson, 30, allegedly traveled from Baltimore to New York to kill black men.
Caughman, 66, who was remembered as a gentleman and a good neighbor, was alone and collecting bottles for recycling when he was attacked from behind with a sword. He staggered, bleeding, into a police station and later died at a hospital.
After discarding the sword in a trash can, Jackson spent hours wandering the city with his hands in his coat pockets gripping two knives, authorities said.
"It was weird. I didn't feel great. I didn't feel horrible either. I thought it (the stabbing) would send me into a blood rage fury," he said on the video.
He allegedly stalked as many as 15 people.
"It just seemed like I was seeing interracial couples everywhere. It was really demoralizing me," he said. "This is the new way and we can't restore what we had 50 years ago."
In a 2017 jailhouse interview with the Daily News, Jackson said he intended the bloodshed as "a practice run" in a mission to deter interracial relationships.
He said he would rather have killed "a young thug" or "a successful older black man with blondes ... people you see in Midtown. These younger guys that put white girls on the wrong path."
Jackson has pleaded not guilty to murder as a hate crime and murder as an act of terrorism.