Joe.My.God. LGBT News
His husband tried to stop the murder, but the police did nothing. There’s a lot to this story. Via Talking Points Memo:
In a bizarre twist, the husband of the Tulsa, Oklahoma man suspected of fatally shooting his Lebanese neighbor on Friday night was apparently friendly with the victim and tried to warn him that his partner was armed and dangerous.
Stephen Schmauss, 76, called Khalid Jabara on Friday evening to tell him that his husband, Stanley Vernon Majors, 61, had acquired a gun, the Tulsa World reported Thursday.
“They had a friendship,” Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a family friend of the Jabaras’ who is serving as their spokesperson, told the newspaper. “It was him who called Khalid to warn that (Majors) had a gun. That was how it started.”
Majors was prohibited from possessing a weapon due to a standing protective order against him filed by Jabara’s mother, Haifa. Police and the family say that Majors harassed the Jabaras for years with ethnic slurs and threats of violence, and he was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other charges, for a violent hit-and-run attack on Haifa Jabara last September.
From the Daily Mail:
“Fuck you and I want to kill you,” Majors told Haifa, according to a police report. “Jabara also stated to officers that Majors said multiple racial slurs to her today in her driveway.”
Over the summer, the tensions between the family and Majors increased, as he continued to allegedly threaten the Jabaras.
“He repeatedly attacked our ethnicity and perceived religion, making racist comments,” Victoria wrote on Facebook. “He often called us ‘dirty Arabs’, ‘filthy Lebanese’, ‘Aye-rabs’, and ‘Mooslems’.”
She ended the post, by paying tribute to her late brother. “At the end of the day, my beautiful brother had a heart like no other,” she wrote. “Sensitive to the core, he loved others so much and wanted to be loved back.”
The Washington Post reports on the shooting:
Khalid Jabara was worried. Last year, his mother had been jogging through the family’s quiet Tulsa neighborhood when she was nearly killed in a vicious hit-and-run. Police quickly arrested Vernon Majors, who, according to a police report, confessed to the crime and even offered a motive, calling the Jabaras “filthy Lebanese.”
On May 25 of this year, however, Majors bonded out of jail. That’s when he returned home — right next to the Jabaras. On Friday, Khalid learned that his next-door neighbor, the man accused of harassing his family and attacking his mother, was now armed.
“Khalid called the police stating this man had a gun and that he was scared for what might happen,” his sister, Victoria Jabara Williams, wrote on Facebook. “The police came and told him there was nothing to be done.”
Minutes later, Khalid was talking on the phone with his mother when he stepped outside to get the mail. Majors was waiting for him, police say. The 61-year-old opened fire, fatally wounding the 37-year-old Khalid, according to police.
The Los Angeles Times reports on Majors’ criminal history:
Khalid Jabara’s family said his killing on the front porch of the family’s Tulsa home “could have been prevented,” given Majors’ criminal record, which includes convictions for violent threats and assault in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.
Friday’s killing came after Majors terrorized his neighbors for “years” with racist and anti-Muslim behavior, according to Jabara’s family, who are Orthodox Christian immigrants from Lebanon. The Jabara family had secured a restraining order against Majors in 2013 barring further contact, which Majors had broken twice in 2015, according to court records.
The Jabaras emigrated from Lebanon during that country’s civil war in the early 1980s, a family friend, Rebecca Abou-Chedid, who is acting as a spokeswoman for the family, told the Los Angeles Times.
The family settled in Tulsa, and according to Abou-Chedid, Majors moved in next door around 2011 — apparently while he was still on parole for felony weapons charges in California, where authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012 for violating the terms of his supervision.
One of Majors’ California convictions includes a 2009 felony case for making threats in Los Angeles County, where he was also under a restraining order from another man. Courts records indicate that Majors was extradited to California in 2013, but he returned to Oklahoma and got married to another man there in 2014.