A white couple blocked a young Mexican-American from entering the San Francisco apartment complex in which he lives, saying that “they would not allow a criminal to enter their complex because they needed to protect him.”
Michael Barajas, a UC-Berkeley graduate and community educator for a biopharmaceutical company, tried to park his car in the apartment complex’s garage Tuesday night when the driver in front of him refused to move forward.
Barajas, 28, told NBC’s Bay Area affiliate KNTV that the situation continued to escalate and became dramatic when the white man in the car became aggressive, prompting him to start recording.
“Given the current political climate, and I am certainly a Mexican American, and that rhetoric of us criminals just hit hard, hit close to home,” Barajas told KNTV.
The white man claimed that Barajas was invading and threatened to call the police.
“Okay. Call the police. Why are you calling the police, Karen?” The video shows Barajas responding.
In an Instagram post, Barajas said the white man “thought he was trying to catch them so they could come in and steal them.” One of the residents of Barajas, who is also white, was outside smoking and intervened in the situation. The driver got out of a white SUV with Florida license plates, hit the neighbor “and threatened to shoot us if we didn’t leave,” Barajas said.
Security officials and police arrived at the scene and Barajas filed a report with his neighbor, despite the fact that “the girlfriend tried to pay us so that we did not call the police and did not file battery charges,” said Barajas, who from he then moved to parking spots “while he threatened to shoot us.”
“This is NOT OK and this shows that racism is fine and alive,” Barajas said, adding that four other people entered the apartment complex through the garage during the incident, and the white man said “nothing for them.”
The white man in the video has been identified on social media as William “Hank” Beasley, who worked at Apex Systems, KNTV reported. The technology services company did not identify Beasley, but said in a tweet that it had fired an employee after “an internal review of the incident” and that it will not tolerate violent or racist behavior.
Beasley’s only public response to the altercation was caught on a local television camera. Beasley said he assaulted the neighbor who intervened because “he was hitting and trashing my car. I called security. That’s all I have to say.”
When asked what he had to say to those who called him a racist, Beasley said, “Why are they attacking me?”
Barajas, who grew up with an immigrant home in Compton, said he “has worked very hard” to pay for his place and now “I don’t feel safe in my own home.”
The apartment complex where he lives said in a statement that they will continue to gather all the facts and work to ensure that their “standards of tolerance, inclusion and safety” are met.
Barajas’ encounter with Beasley comes weeks after another apparently racially profiled incident was caught on video in San Francisco. The white woman involved in that incident, Lisa Alexander, recently apologized for calling police about a Filipino-American man who wrote “Black Lives Matter” in chalk outside her own home. She was also fired from her job.
San Francisco supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the district where the Barajas incident occurred, told KNTV that “no one should go through that where someone treats them with suspicion, anger and aggression that appeared to be discriminatory.”
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