White man who pulled gun gets probation for MLK Day confrontation with Black teens

MIAMI (AP) — A white man has been sentenced to probation in South Florida for pulling a gun and yelling racial slurs in a traffic confrontation with a group of Black teenagers protesting housing inequality on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2019. As part of a deal with with prosecutors, 55-year-old Mark Bartlett pleaded guilty Tuesday to a hate crime and aggravated assault and also agreed not to possess a firearm for a decade. Bartlett had previously claimed he was acting in self-defense during the confrontation, but a Miami-Dade judge ruled following a 2021 hearing that Bartlett did not act reasonably in getting out of his SUV and pulling a pistol on the teenage protesters who had stopped traffic near the Brickell Bridge in downtown Miami.