A white woman in Berkeley, California, repeatedly harassed a biracial family and group of friends for seemingly no reason. When officers arrived, the white woman feigned victimization before being arrested herself.
Although originally reported by Berkeleyside after Memorial Day, the incident is now receiving renewed interest on social media after being shared by Raw Story late Thursday afternoon.
The video shows 30-year-old Essex Cook out for a walk with his 2-year-old son, pregnant girlfriend and friends of various races and ethnicities. Eventually Cook notices that 31-year-old Lauren Milewski appears to be tailing the group at a close distance. They offer to let her pass. She angrily declines and then begins her tirade.
Milewski sneers:
You don’t belong here. Get out of Berkeley. Get out of here. You don’t belong anywhere.
The video is a bit chaotic as Milewski appears to repeatedly test the limits of personal space–moving towards the group while being told to “move” and “stop” over and over. Milewski does not comply with the requests.
According to Cook, his group tried to get away from the woman peacefully on various separate occasions, but she just would not budge. Eventually, the harassing behavior led to violence.
Cook tried to coax his girlfriend into backing away from Milewski when the stranger allegedly attacked his cousin, Elexia Cook. Mr. Cook attempted to break this up by putting Milewski into a pinky hold, which he says he learned from a women’s self-defense class in high school.
The group again pleaded for Milewski to leave. This was also to no avail. After the first altercation died down, Milewski allegedly ran up to a woman in the group who was breastfeeding her 15-month-old child and ripped away her shirt and bra–exposing her breasts and allegedly scratching the mother’s chest.
All the while, another family had apparently witnessed the increasingly provocative and violent escalations. So, they called the police. When officers arrived, Milewski claimed a “mob of people just came at me from out of nowhere and tried to assault me,” as can be heard in the video.
The officers ultimately don’t buy her story, however, as various witnesses on the scene contradicted the off-base accusation. Berkeley Police Lieutenant Peter Hong, who arrived to field the call, later noted that Milewski has a history of acting aggressively.
Milewski was arrested–and she resisted her arrest–but the Cooks family and their friends opted out of pressing charges.
[image via screengrab; video courtesy @sooakland]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher