SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Seattle and San Francisco prosecutors have charged men with hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say led to people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile, sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, the latest in a series of rallies in response to what many said has become a worrying wave of sentiment. anti-Asian.
“We can no longer accept the normalization of being treated as perpetual aliens in this country,” President Tammy Kim said at a rally in Koreatown, LA.
At a rally attended by more than 1,000 people at the San Francisco Civic Center, the city’s police chief, Bill Scott, burst into loud applause when he said, “Hate is the virus and love is vaccination “.
On Friday, prosecutors in King County, Washington, charged Christopher Hamner, 51, with three counts of malicious harassment after police said he called desecrations and threw things at cars in two incidents last week against women and children of Asian heritage, The Seattle Times reported Saturday.
In San Francisco, Victor Humberto Brown, 53, made his first court appearance after authorities said he punched an Asian American man at a bus stop while shouting an anti-Asian insult.
Brown was initially charged with felony criminal mischief, but prosecutors recently elevated the case to a felony, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.. He told the court he has post-traumatic stress disorder.
In Seattle, according to court documents, Hamner called for desecration and threw things at a woman stopped at a red light with her two children, ages 5 and 10, on March 16. Three days later, authorities said Hamner cut another car driven by an Asian Woman, called her a profane letter and the word “Asian” and threw a bottle of water at her car after loading it when entered a parking spot.
On Saturday, Hamner was arrested on $ 75,000 bail. It was not immediately clear whether Hamner, who has not yet filed a court appearance, had retained a lawyer or would be assigned a public defender.
In the first instance, the woman told her ten-year-old daughter to try to take a picture of the man’s cell phone. The woman, identified by KIRO-TV as Pamela Cole, posted about the incident on social media and a friend’s husband identified Hamner as a possible suspect.
The second woman who was attacked had a dashboard camera in her vehicle that captured the license plate of the other car, which is registered to Hamner, according to court documentation. The police detective investigating the case reviewed the video and determined that the woman’s assailant “was clearly Hamner,” according to the allegations.
Cole, who said he identifies as part of China and part of Malaysia, said KIRO-TV felt like “a sitting duck” when Hamner approached her car, punching her fists and yelling at her, “Get out! Get out!” while uttering desecrations about his Asian heritage.
“I was just shocked. Are you talking to me? ”Cole told the station.
“He jumps out of the car and he’s charging us,” he 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 he approached him, shouting “Get out of my country” before using a racial insurrection aimed at denigrating Asian people. Tuason said Brown also said, “It’s for you that there’s a problem here.”
Tuason, 56, said he believed Brown was referring to the coronavirus. Brown punched him several times, he said, knocking him to the ground. He suffered a black eye and a swollen cheek as a result of the attack and said he is also experiencing memory loss.
Police found Brown shortly after Tuason called 911.