Footage of the incident was recorded on Thursday by Mike Kemper, a fellow commuter who was waiting for the train on the platform of a Blue Line Chicago Transit Authority station, the Chicago Defender reported. The video begins with a man in a pink tank top yelling at bystanders and getting in their faces.
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"I'll beat your a**, too," the unidentified white man says. "Well, what are you going to do?"
Though the video doesn't pick up the moment that the racial slur was yelled out, eyewitnesses told the Chicago Sun Times that the man had indeed used the slur, "n***er."
"Why is every motherf**king guy here trying to fight me and call the police?" the man continues, completely unaware that another man was removing his button-down shirt and glasses in preparation for a round of fisticuffs.
Within seconds, the white man was on the floor and slightly dangling over the platform.
"Call another motherf**ker a n***er, again, b*tch," the frustrated commuter yells at the white man as he slaps him. "Call another motherf**ker a n***er again. What the f**k is wrong with you?"
Though the commuter did begin to back away from the situation as others stepped in trying to de-escalate the matter, another punch was thrown out when the pink-shirt-wearing person was getting up from the ground.
The second punch quickly drew a round of screams from the nearby crowd as the man wound up flying onto the train tracks. The video cuts off as the man is being pulled back onto the platform.
According to Kemper, when another black commuter jumped in and tried to help the beaten man back onto the platform, he, too, got a dose of racial slurs.
"My first reaction was… yeah, [the white man] deserved that," the 27-year-old filmer told the publication. "I thought it was well-deserved." Kemper has also stated that he believed the white man was intoxicated.
Officers with the Chicago Police Department did respond to the report, however, by the time they arrived to the scene, they found no victim, according to the Times. A police report has not been filed.
