California White man gives Nazi salute before attacking Black couple's car as woman with him yells racial slurs
TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA: A White man and woman have been accused of harassing a Black couple who had stopped at a traffic light. A video recording of the incident was posted to Instagram and the cellphone footage shows the man making a Nazi salute after the woman gestured obscenely at the other couple and screamed 'white lives matter, b****', and again 'only white lives matter'.
The incident happened on Wednesday night in Torrance, California. It finally ended with the White man grabbing a tool from his truck and repeatedly hitting the Black couple's car until they were forced to speed away.
"Today on my 25th birthday, I was a victim of racism and so was my boyfriend who is black," one of the victims, Itzel Lopez said in the video she posted. "We were being harassed for miles," she also claimed.
Lopez told KTLA5 that she along with her boyfriend were driving back from dinner after celebrating her birthday. That's when they noticed the pickup truck following them. She said as they pulled up to a red light, the vehicle cut in front of theirs. When two White people got out of the vehicle, Lopez began filming, she said. “We tried to get away," Lopez said. "[The white woman] kept standing in front of the car, and wouldn’t let us leave. We were just in shock. We didn’t know what was going. Why were they doing it? They don’t know us." Torrance police is investigating the incident as a possible hate-crime reports The Sun.
This incident comes exactly a month after news of another heinous hate-crime went viral when an 18-year-old biracial woman was allegedly set her on fire by four white men. The woman, Althea Bernstein, was first sprayed with lighter fluid early morning on June 24. The men then set her on fire and Bernstein suffered second and third-degree burns. The case is being investigated as a hate crime.
As MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) had reported, the men then threw a lighter at her face while Bernstein was inside her car. The men had also yelled a racial slur before attacking her, she had revealed. While speaking to Madison 365 in an interview, she said, "I was listening to some music at a stoplight and then all of a sudden I heard someone yell the N-word really loud. I turned my head to look and somebody’s throwing lighter fluid on me. And then they threw a lighter at me, and my neck caught on fire and I tried to put it out, but I brushed it up onto my face. I got it out and then I just blasted through the red light," she shared. "I just felt like I needed to get away. So I drove through the red light and just kept driving until I got to my brother and Middleton."
The Madison police released an official report which read, "The MPD is investigating an assault on an 18-year-old biracial woman as a hate crime after she was burned with lighter fluid early Wednesday morning. The victim believes she was driving on W Gorham St when she stopped for a red light at State St. Her driver’s side window was down and she heard someone yell out a racial epithet. She looked and saw four men, all white," the report reads.