First, the white woman bumped into Takelia Hill’s teenage daughter. Then, she seemed to try to hit the black Michigan mother with her minivan.
And just moments later, Hill found herself in a suburban Detroit parking lot, staring into the muzzle of a pistol, as the woman aimed her weapon at Hill and yelled for her to move back.
“You f—— jumped behind my car, “Back the f— up!”
The startling confrontation, which was partly caught on camera Wednesday afternoon, quickly went viral overnight. As of early Thursday, video of the confrontation had been viewed about 6 million times on Twitter.
For some viewers, the scene may offer a particularly tedious sense of deja vu: Just days earlier, a white couple in St. Louis gained national attention after they brandished their weapons at a group of protesters, most of whom were black and were walking down the couple’s private street.
This summer, America’s so-called Karens won’t stop at phoning the police about black people. Instead, they are armed, threatening to use their weapons on camera.
St. Louis couple point guns at crowd of protesters calling for mayor to resign
Hill said the dangerous confrontation, which took place on the edge between the communities of Orion Township and Auburn Hills, left her and her three daughters traumatized.
“So this is America,” Hill wrote on Facebook following the incident. “I’ve never in my life had a gun pulled out on me. … I’ve never felt so helpless in my life I’m so shaken up.”
Social media posts from someone identifying as a relative say police arrested the white woman, confiscated her guns and then let her go. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post, which could not confirm the woman’s identity.
Neither Hill nor her 15-year-old daughter, Makayla Green, immediately responded to The Post’s request for comment.
The encounter started with a trip to Chipotle. Around 8 p.m. Wednesday, Makayla was walking through a strip mall on her way to the restaurant as the woman was walking in the other direction. The Detroit News was the first to report on the incident.
When the woman bumped into Makayla, the teenager asked her for an apology. Instead, the woman began yelling expletives.
“I had moved out of the way so she can walk out,” Makayla told the News. “She bumped me and I said, ‘Excuse you.’ And then she started cussing me out, and saying things like I was invading her personal space.”
Scared of what might happen next, the teenager called her mother over. The confrontation escalated and a man got out of a gray minivan and pulled the woman inside, the News reported.
“You cannot just walk around calling white people racist,” the woman said through the car’s passenger-side window. “White people aren’t racist. … I care about you and I’m sorry if you had an incident that has made someone make you feel like that. No one is racist.”
After the woman rolled up her window, Hill worried that the car would hit them while backing out. So she turned around to hit the minivan’s back window.
That’s when the woman jumped out and pulled a gun, hurling expletives and ordering Hill and Makayla to move away from her.
“Get away,” the woman said, increasing in volume as she stepped backward.
Off-camera, Hill instructed someone in her family to call the police as the woman continued yelling and pointing the muzzle of her weapon at the camera.
“She’s got the gun on me. She was about to hit me with the car,” she shouted back, adding that the man inside the car was armed, too. “This is crazy! Trump [is] making it real comfortable.”
Moments after the woman climbed back into the minivan, an officer with a weapon drawn arrived on the scene, the News reported.
By that point, the woman was on her hands and knees. An officer picked up a gun on the ground behind her, and another snapped her into handcuffs.
It is unclear how Michigan’s gun laws may apply to the situation. Brandishing a firearm in public is punishable by up to 90 days in jail, a $100 fine or both, except in cases of self-defense or to protect another person.
Source: Washingtonpost.com
