A woman in Roseville, Mich., was the victim of a racist attack in the parking lot of a restaurant over the weekend.
“I never in my life thought something like that would happen to me,” 20-year-old Rochelle Page told 7 Action News Wednesday. “It just seemed to me like pure hate because I’m Black.”
Page said that she arrived at National Coney Island to pick up a to-go order just after midnight on Jan. 12. After she came back to hop in her friend’s car, however, things took a turn.
“I told her, I was like ‘stop, hold on, it’s some people behind you.’ She never hit them or anything she stopped,” her friend said.
But then, Page said the man kicked her friend’s vehicle and began hurling racial slurs at them.
“He was calling us n——,” she said, noting he kept using the slur repeatedly.
Page got out the car and asked the man, who was white, what he said.
“He swung on me and hit me, after that, I blacked out and woke up in the ambulance,” she says. “I was told my head hit the concrete because it was bleeding.”
Page suffered a concussion, cuts and a huge bruise on her right cheek. She was taken to a local hospital and treated for her injuries
Authorities in the Detroit suburb are currently searching for the culprit and hope they’ll be able to get video footage from the restaurant. Page’s attacker is described as a white male in his 20s, about 6 feet 1, with black hair and glasses. Cops say he drove off in an older-model Buick.
Meanwhile, the victim’s mother, Rosie Robinson, is personally offering a $1,000 reward for information regarding the attack that could lead to an arrest.
“For her to be my child, I felt it deeply,” Robinson says. “When your child melts and cries in your arms … I didn’t raise my children to have hatred toward anybody. … I need whoever did this, whoever saw this, the girls that were there to step forward and say something. This man can’t go around hurting black women, women period and get away with it.”
“It makes me upset,” Page says. “I’m hurt, honestly.”
