Michigan ‘Karen’ who pulled gun on Black mother and teen daughter arrested along with her racist husband
AUBURN HILLS, MICHIGAN: A White couple was arrested after a gun was pulled on a Black mother and her 15-year-old daughter on the evening of Wednesday, July 1, outside an Oakland County Chipotle restaurant. Jillian Wuestenberg and her husband Eric Wuestenberg have been charged with felonious assault on Thursday, July 2, Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper said in a release.
The altercation that was recorded on a cellphone took place on July 1 outside a Chipotle in Orion Township, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) northwest of Detroit. In the video, Jillian was seen shouting “get the fu** away! Get away!” while pointing a handgun. She then gets in the vehicle which was driven by Eric, The Daily Mail reported. Sheriff Michael Bouchard said that the accused pair is from Independence Township, who have hidden their pistol licenses. Their weapons have reportedly been seized by the police after they were arrested on July 1 night following the encounter.
The three-minute video that was shared online showed part of the altercation. The Black woman, identified as Takelia Hill, said the confrontation happened after Jillian bumped into her teenage daughter, Makayla Green, before they could enter the restaurant. However, when Green asked for an apology from Jillian, she started shouting at her. “Before I could walk into Chipotle, this woman was coming out and I had moved out the way so she can walk out. She bumped me and I said, 'Excuse you.' And then she started cussing me out and saying things like I was invading her personal space,” Green said. She also stated that since the interaction made her scared, she called her mother over who was standing at a distance. “I walked up on the woman yelling at my daughter. She couldn’t see me because her back was to me, but she was in my daughter's face,” Hill added.
However, the issue did not end there and continued to the restaurant parking lot. The altercation in the parking was captured on the camera that showed Hill and Green arguing with the White woman about how she had allegedly bumped into the daughter. “She did something wrong, she needs to apologize,” Hill was heard saying in the clip to which Jillian replied: “You're blocking me from getting in my car.”
Eric then came out of the car and yelled at the Black mother-daughter duo. He was heard saying: “Who the (expletive) do you think you guys are? You called her names, she did nothing to you.” As the White man went back to the vehicle, Green said, “You're very racist and ignorant.” But Jillian defended her husband and said from the passenger seat of the car: “You can't just walk around calling white people racist. This is not that type of world. White people aren't racist, no one is racist.”
However, when Hill again questioned her for bumping into her daughter, the woman suspect said, “I care about you and I'm sorry if you've had an incident where someone has made you feel like that.”
After the heated argument, Hill backed off from the couple’s SUV. However, all of a sudden she began yelling and saying that she thought the vehicle was going to hit her. She also knocked on the back window of the car to stop the couple. Jillian then jumped out of the car and pulled a gun at her as she shouted, “Get away”. To which Hill responded, “She got the gun on me, she was about to hit me with the car. Call them, get the license plate. Get the license plate now! Cause you were about to hit me with the car?”
Jillian was heard saying, “Don't you f***ing jump behind my car!”, shouting repeatedly: “Get the f*** back!” pointing the gun straight at the victim. She also yelled at people to get away from her and her vehicle, while a woman in the parking lot said, “'She's got a gun on me!” and urged someone to call the police. The White woman then lowered her gun and drove away from the place with her husband.
Talking about the incident, Hill said her two other daughters were in the car when the altercation happened. She also said the episode has left the whole family traumatized.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Cooper said her office filed the charges against the couple after viewing the video. “It is an unfortunate set of circumstances that tempers run high over, basically, not much of an incident,” she said. While sheriff Bouchard said that people were “picking sides” and have also made threatening calls to the sheriff's office dispatch center after the videos were posted online. “We don´t see sides. We see facts. There's a lot of tension in our society, a lot of tension among folks and people with each other,” Bouchard said, adding: “I would just say this, we are asking and expect our police — and rightfully so — to deescalate every situation they possibly can, and we should be doing that. But I would say that needs to happen with us individually in our own lives and situations, that we interact with each other and deescalate those moments.”