A Michigan man may face hate crime charges for attacking a FedEx driver and stealing his deliveries while repeatedly calling him the N-word.
Tirrell Lipsey caught the assault on Aug. 27, in Portage, Michigan, on his dash camera video and shared it with the media.
The man also threw packages off Lipsey’s truck and followed Lipsey on his route to swipe others. One of the thefts was caught on a Ring doorbell camera.
“This guy just walks up to the truck, and he walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Forgive your father’ on the driver’s side of my door, and then he tried to strike me in the face,” said Lipsey.
The video shows Lipsey, a Marine Corps reservist, slapping the man’s hands away with a package when he reaches to hit the driver.
“You dumb, Black N————r,” the man yells before continuing his verbal attack.
Lipsey said he had been working for FedEx for two years. It was his regular route, and he had never experienced anything like that.
“I was shocked, confused, really irritated at the time. He ended up stepping into my truck, and I said, ‘No, you have to get down. You can’t be up here,” Lipsey told Wood TV.
The driver said the man called him the N-word at least twice, rambled about his dog, and at one point said he would sic the animal on Lipsey.
Video footage from the incident made public by local news stations censored most of the attacker’s language.
“It got to the point where he was saying stuff about the devil being in the boxes,” Lipsey said.
The man also walked around with a resident’s motorcycle and asked Lipsey if he knew how to start it, the driver said. Reports show he broke into a home, tried to give the resident a flower, and then tried to enter a second home.
Before attacking the delivery driver, police said the man trespassed and broke a birdbath.
Resident Andrew Moore told Wood TV that the package the suspect stole from the front of his house had medical supplies inside for his sister.
A FedEx spokesperson said the company is “both saddened and outraged by the behavior exhibited in this video, and our first concern is for the driver involved.”
“We are staying connected with him and offering our support. We also have verified that a police report was filed and an investigation is underway to further address this incident.”
Police said the assailant was on methamphetamine and was taken to the hospital to be treated for a mental condition. Reports show the suspect was arrested, and authorities are considering charging him with assault and battery, ethnic intimidation, illegal entry, larceny, and malicious destruction of property.
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations released a statement urging authorities to move forward with the charges.
“We call on law enforcement to charge the suspect in this apparent assault within the full extent of the law, including consideration of an ethnic intimidation charge,” said Dawud Walid, the organization’s executive director. “No one should be intimidated from performing the duties of their occupation due to threats of violence and racial slurs.”
Lipsey’s mother, Cathy Phason, said she was so “livid” that she could not watch the entire video.
“To still feel like we have to deal with this, deal with the racial slurs, and I’m not sure what it was if it’s mental or whatever, but to me, it’s very upsetting,” Phason said.
