Sometimes there’s a journalist with such vision, such integrity and moxy, that there’s no need to wait until the facts are delivered. A Free Press columnist can just go with their guts when talking about serious crimes and accusations. Should the story unravel differently from what you predicted then hey, the paper can just pretend like it didn’t happen.

“Somebody knows” is how Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley started off her column on August 28th. Somebody knew what happened to Zachary Tennan alright, and that somebody was Rochelle Riley. Tennan, 19-year-old object of pity was in the hospital after being physically assaulted, claiming a pair of Neo Nazi white supremacists, who were attending a college house party, asked him if he was Jewish and had attacked him. They left him with a broken jaw and had stapled his mouth shut. Afterwards the heartless party goers let the poor soul had to stumble to a hospital on his own.

“Witnesses of attack on MSU student must name names” her August 28th article was entitled. “It is not enough to whisper about it.” Riley wrote “It is not enough to gossip.” Those with excellent memories recall how Riley condemned the E. Lansing police for not rushing to this poor soul’s side.

”The worst thing is that the East Lansing Police Department, whose lead investigator, Detective Jeff Murphy, and chief of police, Julie Liebler, could not be reached for comment, just issued a press release saying that what happened to Zachary Tennen is likely not a hate crime….If the police don’t believe that those hateful things happened, there’s this: Somebody knocked the kid out and stapled his mouth. That, detectives, is not self-defense, or involuntary. That is a hate crime.”

If you’d like to read her original rallying cry, that’s too bad. The Free Press as of this writing as taken down the article as the truth has finally come out.

Tennen’s story began to fall apart fairly quickly. He was not stapled in the mouth, he was in fact assisted by several students to help for his injuries. Deadline Detroit has reported that not only was religion/race not a factor, but that Tennen was actually a perpetrator that night. He was drunk and sexually assaulting girls at the party. After being told several times to leave the girls alone he was punched in the face by the guy who was trying to protect them. He was a grabby teenage boy drunk on his first taste of freedom and way too much alcohol who didn’t take no for an answer and got popped in the face. He panicked and told a vicious and ugly lie that was suspicious at first glance to police.

Now that the facts are in, we all know what really happened that night. Will the Detroit Free Press acknowledge it?

Riley is not guilty of bad judgement alone, she is guilty of bad journalism. She jumped to conclusions before the facts were in. She was wrong to to think that E. Lansing residents were blase in the face of a “hate crime” and wrong to insinuate that police were doing anything less then their due diligence in resolving the matter. What is owed is an apology, and acknowledgement from the Free Press that perhaps the gun was jumped by a member of their staff. Here would be the accompanying link to the original column, but in the interested of journalistic integrity the Detroit Free Press has removed the embarrassing article (bravo guys).