Police in Los Angeles County investigated a possible hate crime after a white woman was caught on video using a series of racial slurs and comments evocative of violence.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the incident occurred at a CVS in the northeastern city of Eagle Rock on Tuesday and was reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on Wednesday.
Video of the tirade was posted to Instagram and quickly went viral.
In the footage, the sunglasses-bedecked woman stands in the entryway of the drugstore and repeatedly shouts the n-word while occasionally jumping up and down as another customer exits.
The woman’s shouting continues on and becomes semi-threatening:
I’d kill a [n-word] but the law says I can’t kill the [n-word]s. If the law didn’t say I can’t kill the [n-word]s then they’d all be dead.
A CVS customer expressed shock and dismay at the incident in comments to local CBS affiliate KCAL-9.
“I’m extremely surprised to see it in Eagle Rock, because there’s a whole bunch of all kinds of minorities here,” the customer said. “That’s all I can say, I’m surprised to see it here.”
Local CW affiliate KTLA-5 spoke with a man who identified himself as the woman’s neighbor of nearly a decade.
In comments to the outlet, the man said that he and his mother are familiar with her racial- and ethnically-based slurs.
“Her and her husband have been just behaving very dishearteningly with our neighbors,” the neighbor said. “At least with our family, we had to file restraining orders against her and her husband for warning to threaten us, to assault us. They were yelling racial slurs. [And saying things like] ‘Go back to your country. This is not the place for you.'”
The man, who only identified himself as Tony, said he and his mother are of Italian descent.
“She’s yelled racial slurs at her,” he told KTLA-5, “Threatened to attack her. Threatened to cut her throat. We have this all on video. We have shown it to the courts.”
After an initial investigation, the LAPD filed a hate incident report but reportedly decided that no crime was actually committed.
[image via screengrab and video courtesy KTLA-5]
