SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Prosecutors in Seattle and San Francisco have accused men of hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say targeted people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile and sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and across the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, the latest in a series of rallies in response to what many said has turned into a troubling wave of anti-Asian sentiment.
“We can no longer accept being treated like eternal foreigners in this country,” speaker Tammy Kim told a meeting in Koreatown, LA.
At a rally attended by more than 1,000 people at the Civic Center in San Francisco, city police chief Bill Scott received loud applause when he said, “Hate is the virus and love is the vaccination.”
On Friday, prosecutors in King County, Washington, accused Christopher Hamner, 51, of malicious harassment three times after police said he yelled blasphemy and thrown things at cars in two incidents targeting women and children of Asian descent last week, reported The Seattle Times. Saturday.
In San Francisco, Victor Humberto Brown, 53, first appeared in court after authorities said he repeatedly hit an Asian-American man at a bus stop while yelling an anti-Asian slur.
Brown was initially charged on wrongdoing, but prosecutors recently turned the case into a felony, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.He said in court that he has post-traumatic stress disorder.
In Seattle, according to court documents, Hamner shouted blasphemy and threw things at a woman who was faced with a red light on March 16 with her two children, ages 5 and 10. Three days later, authorities say Hamner cut off another car driven by an Asian woman shouted a blasphemy and the word ‘Asian’ at her, then threw a water bottle at her car after attacking her as she pulled into a parking lot.
Hamner was held on $ 75,000 bail on Saturday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Hamner, who has not yet appeared in court, would have retained a lawyer or would be given a public defender.
At first, the woman told her 10-year-old daughter to try to take a cell phone photo of the man. The woman, identified by KIRO-TV as Pamela Cole, posted on social media about the incident and a friend’s husband identified Hamner as a possible suspect.
The second woman approached had a dashboard camera in her vehicle that recorded the license plate of the other car, which, according to court documents, is in Hamner’s name. The police officer investigating the case watched the video and determined that the woman’s attacker was “clearly Hamner,” the charges said.
Cole, who said she identifies part Chinese and part Malaysian, told me KIRO-TV made her feel like “a sitting duck” as Hamner approached her car, clapped his fists and yelled at her, “Get out! Get out!” while spewing blasphemy on her Asian heritage.
‘I was in shock. Are you talking to me? ”Cole told the station.
“He jumps out of the car, and he storms towards us,” she said. “That was the scariest part for me.”
In San Francisco, Ron Tuason, an Army veteran of Filipino, Chinese, and Spanish descent, told The Chronicle that he was at a bus stop in the city’s Ingleside neighborhood on March 13 when Brown approached him and shouted, ‘Go my country off ‘before using it. a racial slur intended to belittle Asian people. Tuason said Brown also said, “Because of you, there is a problem here.”
Tuason, 56, said he believes Brown was referring to the coronavirus. Brown hit him several times, he said, knocking him to the ground. He got a black eye and a swollen cheek as a result of the attack and said he also has amnesia.
Police found Brown shortly after Tuason called 911.