Racist yells anti-Asian slurs while striking convenience store with metal bar
A man wielding a metal bar stormed into a Korean-owned convenience store and trashed the interior while shouting racial slurs. Surveillance footage captured the horrific moments that the suspect violently struck items and the transparent plastic partition at the cashier counter as the owners stood back.
The video showed the man entering Plaza Sundries, a store near the Charlotte Transit Center in North Carolina, last Tuesday and pulling a shelf of merchandise to the floor. The suspect used what appeared to be a street sign post and tried to break the glass refrigerator doors. As customers left the store, a man wearing a red shirt, apparently a friend of the suspect, entered and cheered him on. The video did not include audio revealing the racial slurs.
As police officers arrived, the culprit grabbed a Monster energy drink, Mark Sung, whose parents own the shop, told the Charlotte Observer. Sung, who was not present at the time of the incident, said it was not the first time his parents have suffered racist attacks.
‘Chinese (expletive). Go back to your country. It’s like the first thing they can think of when they look at us’, Sung said. ‘Usually, it’s the first thing that comes of their mouth’.
Sung said his parents closed the store to clean up but that the suspect’s friend returned and tried to make eye contact with his mother through the glass.
‘(He’s) making these sexual poses again and telling her to do these sexual acts and she’s just furious, but doesn’t know what to do’, Sung said, adding that the friend returned again on Thursday to continue harassing the couple.
G4S, the private security company that oversees the transit center, arrested Xavier Rashee Woody-Silas, 24, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Woody-Silas was charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, communicating threats, injury to personal property, disorderly conduct and resisting a public officer.
A GoFundMe account for the family states that the business owners work 13 to 15 hours ‘every single day, even on Christmas’ because ‘they say holidays are when people need them to be open the most’.
‘No one deserves this kind of racism and violence’, a nephew wrote on the page.
The attack comes amid an uptick in hate crimes against Asians across the US. In a series of mass shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area in mid-March, six of the eight victims were Asian women.
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