The video, captured by a customer, shows a woman yelling “I hate n****rs” while walking out of a CVS. As the customer taking the video follows the woman out of the store, the woman proceeds to yell, “F**k you, n****rs. I hate n****rs.”
“I would kill a n****r, but the law says I can’t kill the n****rs. If the law didn’t say that I couldn’t kill the n****rs, they’d all be dead,” she continues before stopping by her vehicle. The video ends as the woman begins to chant “n****r.”
According to several sources, including local news station KTLA5, which spoke to a man who claims to be her neighbor, the woman in the video is Heather Patton. However, the Los Angeles Police Department has yet to officially confirm the woman’s identity.
The woman’s neighbor, who asked to only be identified as Tony, said she has a history of racist tirades and outbursts.
“We had to file restraining orders against her and her husband for warning to … threaten us, to assault us. They were yelling racial slurs,” Tony, who said he is of Italian descent, told KTLA5. Tony also said the woman has told him and his mother, also of Italian descent, to return to their country.
According to KTLA5, Tony provided security footage of the woman in the video threatening to slit someone’s throat, as well as another video in which a woman and a man are involved in a physical altercation in the middle of the street.
It is unclear if the woman in the second security video was the same woman shown in the now-viral video. Tony also said that he installed the security camera system after the woman in the viral video vandalized his father’s truck. The footage was used in court proceedings, he noted.
Renée Saldaña, a 38-year-old woman who witnessed the incident, also captured a video of the CVS incident on her phone. She told BuzzFeed News that she wanted to get the footage “on tape” in case the incident became “violent.”
“Aside from being a threat to the woman who was filming it, it was one of those incidents where you felt like, ‘Man, does she have a gun? Is she going to come back in here?’” Saldaña recently told BuzzFeed News.
“It felt like there was violence in the air.”
Saldaña also noted that none of the employees at the CVS told the woman to leave when she began her outburst. When the woman got into her car, she “tore out of the parking lot, screeching tires,” driving on the wrong side of the street. “It was scary,” Saldaña commented to BuzzFeed News.
In an Instagram story, a woman who claims to be Patton wrote an apology. “I as a human made the choice to say some words that I shouldn’t NEVER let come out of my mouth. I will no longer ask for forgiveness because what I did as a human was very inhumane and disgusting,” the woman wrote, also noting that she has lost her job.
— Malynda Hale (@MalyndaHale) September 26, 2019
She continued, “Please do not contact me. I was intoxicated and I sincerely apologize to everyone whom I disrespected and let down for my actions. Please forgive me.”
A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson confirmed that an incident report was completed Wednesday and an investigation into the incident is ongoing.
