North Carolina men wearing MAGA hats threaten Black mom and teen daughter at gunpoint, yell 'they're ghetto'
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA: A North Carolina mother revealed she and her teenage daughter had their life threatened by two men wearing 'Make America Great Again' hats this past week. Zariel Balogun told ABC13 that the incident unfolded at a four-way stop near a BJ's Wholesale Club after she had finished loading groceries in her car and started leaving. In a 911 recording of the call she subsequently made, she can be heard explaining to an operator that she went when it was time for her to go, but that another truck started going at the same time as well. She said she honked, which enraged the two men in the truck, who then started screaming at her.
Balogun told the operator that the men drove up to her and then followed her to a stoplight on Capital Boulevard, where the situation escalated further. She claimed the men pulled out a gun and pointed it at her and her 15-year-old daughter. "He pointed (the gun) at me and my 15-year-old daughter that was in the passenger side seat, and I told him to put his gun away cause he wasn't going to shoot anyone," she said. "When I said that, it kind of made him mad. He started yelling, 'Oh they're not scared of guns. They're ghetto, Black b******.'"
"He immediately turned his hat around and said, 'This is exactly why we need to Make America Great Again because of these ghetto Black b******,'" she continued, adding that they did not stop using the racist and sexist language there.
"If he wanted to shoot, there's nothing that I could have done," she said. "He pointed the gun at me and my child."
The mom said it was unnecessary and that it was an "intimidation tactic" that was "being done on a regular basis." She said she had filed a police report for aggravated assault and that she had given investigators a photo of the truck where the license plate could be seen.
The day after the incident, Balogun joined the North Carolina Black Alliance and Emancipate NC to share her experience outside of the Wake County Courthouse, reported WRAL. At the conference, a lawyer with Balogun, Dawn Blagrove, said the Raleigh Police had not returned her call for more than 24 hours. "To those folks who are still confused about why we have to say and proclaim that Black Lives Matter, it is because a black woman and her 16-year-old child can be driving down the streets of Raleigh and a white man, who hurls racial slurs at them, points a gun at her 16-year-old child can call the police department of Raleigh and not have anyone return her call for more than 24-hours," he said.
He called on Freeman and Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown to investigate the men, who he said were an "ongoing threat," and termed the incident a "hate crime." He also said the "community is a hotbed of this kind of racial intimidation."
"Those are things, that not only do we take seriously, but the law takes seriously," he said. "We expect federal charges, we expect state charges."