First, the white woman allegedly bumped into Takelia Hill’s teenage daughter. Then, her husband seemed to try to hit the black Michigan mother with their minivan.
And after confronting the couple, Hill found herself in a suburban Detroit parking lot, staring into the muzzle of a pistol, as the woman aimed her weapon at Hill and yelled for her to move back.
“You f------ jumped behind my car,” the woman said, later shouting, “Back the f--- up!”
The startling confrontation in Oakland County, Mich., which was partly caught on camera Wednesday afternoon, quickly went viral overnight. As of Thursday afternoon,
video of the confrontation had been
viewed about 12 million times on Twitter.
“I am deeply disturbed by an incident last night where a woman pointed a cocked gun at another woman during an argument. This behavior is unacceptable,” Oakland County Executive David Coulter said in a statement Thursday.
Six people, including bystanders and those involved in the confrontation, called 911 as the incident unfolded. When deputies arrived in the parking lot, they “were presented with two very different stories” in which both sides claimed “they felt extremely threatened,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard told reporters Thursday afternoon. The sheriff’s department has reviewed two videos of the incident.
Oakland County prosecutor Jessica R. Cooper charged the woman who drew the gun and the man who drove the van with one count each of felonious assault, which is punishable by up to 4 years imprisonment upon conviction.
The married couple held Michigan concealed pistol licenses. Both the man and woman were armed. The sheriff said he did not know whether the man also pointed his handgun.
Hill said the dangerous confrontation, which took place on the edge between the communities of Orion Township and Auburn Hills, left her and her three daughters traumatized.
“So this is America,” Hill
wrote on Facebook following the incident. “I’ve never in my life had a gun pulled out on me. … I’ve never felt so helpless in my life I’m so shaken up.”
Neither Hill nor her 15-year-old daughter, Makayla Green, immediately responded to The Post’s request for comment.
Around 6 p.m. Wednesday, Makayla was walking through a strip mall on her way to the restaurant as the woman was walking in the other direction, according to the Detroit News, which
was the first to report on the incident.
When the woman allegedly bumped into Makayla, the teenager called her out.
“I had moved out of the way so she can walk out,” Makayla
told the News. “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.”
In a three-minute
video obtained by the newspaper, the woman claimed that Hill and Makayla were blocking her from getting back to her car. As her husband got out of the gray minivan parked nearby and pulled the woman inside, Hill began challenging them, too.
“You’re not going to sit there and violate a 15-year-old,” she told the woman, before turning to the man: “Yeah, I said it. You say something, and I’ll beat your white a-- too.”
Instead of the two families going their separate ways, their altercation got louder.
“You cannot just walk around calling white people racist,” the woman said, now through the car’s passenger-side window. “White people aren’t racist. … I care about you and I’m sorry if you had an incident that has made someone make you feel like that. No one is racist.”
After the woman rolled up her window, Hill feared that the car would hit them while backing out, she told the News. So she turned around to hit the minivan’s back window.
That’s when the woman jumped out and pulled a gun, hurling expletives and ordering Hill and Makayla to move away from her.
“Get away,” the woman said, increasing in volume as she stepped backward.
Off-camera, Hill instructed someone in her family to call the police as the woman continued yelling and pointing the muzzle of her weapon at the camera.
“She’s got the gun on me. She was about to hit me with the car,” she shouted back, adding that the man inside the car was armed, too. “This is crazy! Trump [is] making it real comfortable."
Moments after the woman climbed back into the minivan, a deputy with a weapon drawn arrived on the scene, the News reported.
By that point, the woman was on her hands and knees. A deputy picked up a gun on the ground behind her, and another snapped her into handcuffs.
The couple was taken into police custody, officials said. They are scheduled to be arraigned Thursday evening.