Posted Feb. 7, 2008 - Because one of the six people who kidnapped, raped and tortured a young Black West Virginia woman last year yelled racial slurs during the ordeal, she is looking at an addition hate-crime count, prosecutors said this week.

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Karen Burton, 46, of Chapmanville, was indicted on hate-crime charges; she is the one accused of saying, “This is what we do to ni**ers down here,” as she stabbed Williams in the ankle, The Associated Press reports.

The six Whites are accused of luring 20-year-old Megan Williams to a shack in rural West Virginia, where they stabbed her, forced her to animal and human feces and sexually assaulted her last September.

Williams was rescued on Sept. 8 after an anonymous caller alerted Logan County sheriff’s deputies. Burton’s attorney, Betty Gregory, said her client was “a little surprised” by the hate crime charge but was relieved that an earlier sexual assault count was not included in the indictment, AP reports.

“She didn’t want her children to think anything like that about her,” Gregory said. Burton, who has two bi-racial children, will argue in court that she “has a significant history of child abuse from her own childhood,” Gregory said.

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