A California woman is speaking out about being racially profiled while shopping for essentials during a coronavirus lockdown.
Deja Patterson, 24, says she and her mom Theresa, and her cousin Reem, hit up a WinCo Foods in Pittsburg, California, on Monday evening and were accosted over a bag of lemons, MadameNoire reports.
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The women live in Castro Valley and visited the Pittsburg location to shop for necessities after the county was placed under a shelter-in-place lockdown.
“Grocery stores here are scarce, we knew that going to WinCo, we would find most likely what we need. We had called WinCo actually beforehand and they had told us that they were fully stocked so that is why we went there,” Patterson said in an interview with MadameNoire.
Here’s more of the report:
Patterson said after security admitted them into the store, they visited the produce section but were unable to locate clear plastic produce bags. After looking around, the group asked a worker in the produce section if there were any bags, to which he responded no. According to Patterson, they “improvised” and decided to use a bag for grapefruits, by dumping the fruit into its section. They then filled the empty grapefruit bag with lemons. All of a sudden, the same worker informed them that they would have to walk to the back of the store and retrieve a produce bag. As the group complied and gathered their lemons, they were approached by an employee named Kenny, who later introduced himself as the store manager.
The almost eight-minute video, captured by Reem, picks up minutes after the confrontation with Kenny begins as he confronts Patterson and her mom about the empty grapefruit bag in their cart, accusing them of stealing. Patterson told MadameNoire the video did not show that Kenny had followed the group and aggressively reached inside their cart to grab the empty grapefruit bag.
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Watch the clip below.
