An altercation between a mother and her adult son harassing a Black man just trying to do his job in a parking garage ended in yet another call to the police — but the victim says he’s the one who will be pressing charges.
Johnny Martinez says that he was working for a third-party company hired by the River House apartments in Nashville, Tennessee, to check the permits for cars parked in the building’s garage when he was stopped by people who demanded identification and insisted he didn’t belong there.
After a certain point, he began recording, capturing their demands that soon escalated into the adult son appearing to attempt to knock Johnny’s phone out of his hand.
“Get that f—king phone out of my face,” the man says, despite having to run towards Johnny to get close enough to swipe at it.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Johnny asks. “You stupid?”
The woman then calls 911 in response, even as her son is insisting he never attacked Johnny. She tells the operator that there’s a “gentleman” who won’t show them an ID and has “kind of gotten nasty towards” them.
In response to a question from the person on the other side of the phone, the woman has to clarify that she herself isn’t security. Her son then says he is going to go get the actual security for the building and tells his mother to “stay away from that crazy man.”
Johnny claims that the whole thing started for “no apparent reason” while he was “performing a routine parking permit audit.” He also says that when he was first approached by the two, he was wearing his ID around his neck and told them that he was working, and believes that they refused to accept that and demand further proof as a way to demean him.
“The first words that came out of the Karen’s mouth were ‘you don’t belong here, how did you get in here,’” he wrote.
He also says that the police did eventually come and he filed a report and plans to press charges. “The Karen had also…conveniently left out the fact her son assaulted me,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirmed to the Daily Dot that the police were called out to the apartment garage and an officer watched Johnny’s video.
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