A woman who was accused of stabbing an Asian American student at Indiana University Bloomington last year because she said she had “noticed” the victim was Chinese has pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime charge, court documents show.
Billie Davis, 57, entered the plea last week after she was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with felony violation of the Hate Crime Act. It comes after Davis repeatedly stabbed the 18-year-old student in the head on a city transit bus, later telling law enforcement that she did it so that there would be “one less enemy,” the plea agreement showed.
Davis, who will be sentenced in December, faces a maximum of six years in prison, according to the plea agreement. She will also be mandated to serve probation upon release and pay the victim restitution.
Davis’ attorneys, Leslie D. Wine and H. Samuel Ansell, told NBC News that the plea agreement, reached through “extensive negotiations,” will allow the court to consider both the offense as well as her “diminished capacity” due to mental illness.
“Ms. Davis is now properly medicated for her mental health conditions and has consistently expressed her remorse for the pain she caused the victim and her family,” the attorneys said in an email.
The student, who has only been identified as Z.F., was seated near the back of the bus when Davis boarded and sat down nearby, according to the plea agreement. When the student attempted to get off at her stop, Davis stabbed her seven to 10 times in the head with a knife. Davis eventually left the bus, while another passenger followed her in an effort to confront her about the violence.
“The Defendant told the passenger that the female she attacked was going to blow up the bus because she was Asian,” the plea agreement said, adding that Davis also shouted a racial slur at the passenger.
After police arrived and arrested Davis, she told them that she ”snapped a minute ago, I hit some girl,” and described the student with a racial slur, the plea agreement said.
Following the incident, investigators accessed footage from within the bus that showed no prior interactions between Davis and the victim, a press release from the Bloomington Police Department said.
The victim, who was transported to a nearby hospital, ended up sustaining multiple stab wounds on her head, with cuts that went up to 1.75 cm deep and a hematoma, or a pool of clotted blood. The injuries required sutures and stitches, documents said.
The incident left many Asian American students at the university shaken, with several previously telling NBC News that they did not feel sufficiently supported.
Marah Yankey, then-senior media relations consultant for Indiana University, said last year that the victim’s request for privacy “limits what IU or other local officials can say publicly.”
“But it does not diminish our university’s commitment to provide support to them, their family, and — of course — to our students, faculty and staff,” she said in an email.
Some pointed out that the anti-Asian hate was particularly concerning given the area’s history of race-related violence against Asian students. Former IU student Benjamin Smith, a vocal white supremacist, murdered 26-year-old doctoral student Won-Joon Yoon in 1999 outside the Korean United Methodist Church. Smith, who earlier that year had been sought in a series of shootings that targeted Black, Jewish and Asian people, fatally shot himself that same night.
