‘I wasn’t surprised to be completely honest,’ one victim said
A Black Lives Matter protester who demonstrated at Seattle’s CHOP autonomous zone last summer has been charged with hate crimes against Asian-American women, KOMO-TV reported.
What are the details?
Seattle police arrested Christopher Hamner last month for two alleged incidents of anti-Asian hate attacks, the station said.
Pamela Cole told KOMO that Hamner threatened her and her young children when she tried to drive past him.
“He just opens his door and starts yelling at me ‘F you, you Asian B! ‘F you’ kind of thing,” Cole recalled to the station. “And then he pulls in the parking lot and comes charging at us.”
Investigators said Hamner made similar anti-Asian hate threats to two other women just days later, KOMO added.
Cole noted to KCPQ-TV that Hamner also yelled at her, “Get out! Get out! Get out!” and that “me and my kids [were] just stuck” and that she felt “so helpless and defenseless as a mom.”
Black Lives Matter
Nevertheless, KOMO reported that Hamner often was seen protesting with Black Lives Matter last summer and that he posted videos of himself on his social media accounts demonstrating at CHOP, the left-wing militant “autonomous zone” in downtown Seattle controlled by BLM and Antifa.
“Of course it strikes me as hypocritical, but I wasn’t surprised to be completely honest,” Cole told the station. “I wasn’t shocked about it.”
KOMO spoke with some leaders of the city’s racial justice protests who remember Hamner, and they said he always seemed to be on the fringe. The station said one leader remembers his “creepy stares,” and another characterized his actions as coming “out of left field.”
A victim tried to help him
Cole told KOMO she reached out to Hamner’s employers at a VA hospital to try to get him help since she doesn’t believe putting him behind bars will do him any good.
“At the end of the day if he goes to jail, he still comes out as a racist full of hate,” she noted to the station. “Nothing’s changed. He didn’t learn anything. … There was no rehab in it, so to me it’s pointless.”
KOMO said Hamner remains in custody and is due to enter a plea on hate crime charges Thursday morning.
*story by The Blaze
