In the latest incident of a white person appearing to attack a Black person minding their Black business, a Black woman says she was ambushed on her way to work by an old, male Karen. However, this wasn’t the typical tantrum...the video shows a horrendous scene.
Jasmine Thomas, 25, tells WRDW she was on her way to work last week arriving at a home on Bellreive Drive in Aiken, S.C. when the incident happened. There, she was providing hospice care to the father of Josh Herring and has been for about a year, the report says.
“We fell in love with her because she takes good care of my dad,” said Herring via the report.
However, her typical shift was brutally interrupted. Luckily, she recorded the incident. In a TikTok, a white man approached the driver side of her vehicle, pounding angrily on her window. As she rolled her window down, the man appeared to punch at her through the opening multiple times. The two then appeared to get into a scuffle as she tried to open the door.
“Imagine being [on the way] to work and being followed to your job because the color of your skin then assaulted #RacismStillExists” read the video’s caption.
According to an incident report, Thomas said she saw the man earlier parked in his car on the side of the road talking to a neighbor, per The Augusta Press. She then told police after he spotted her that he sped up behind her and followed her to the Herrings’ house before exiting his car and approaching hers. At the moment she tried to open the door, the police report says the man grabbed her door and slammed it on her multiple times.
“You don’t belong here!” the man shouted in the video, while also spitting slurs and calling her a b**h.
In the video, Thomas managed to escape her vehicle but also proceeded to give the man a piece of her mind.
“You lost yo motherf—-ng mind. Don’t come banging on my window. You just hit me. And I’m finna call the police. You goin to jail,” she shouted as the Herrings scurried out of their home to break up the conflict.
The couple was seen holding the white man back as he continued bucking toward Thomas, per the video. Though Thomas held her own during the incident, she was left shaken by it.
“Now it’s like every time I hear something loud, it’s kind of traumatizing because it’s like, what is it,” she told WRDW.
Herring told police he believed the incident was racially motivated as Thomas was a regular worker at the home caring for the family. The video and home camera footage was provided to the police. Authorities then identified the culprit as 79-year-old John Rosso. He was charged with third-degree assault and battery on Friday, May 2.