Prosecutors have charged a white Minneapolis woman who went on a foul, expletive-filled rant against a Black Uber driver before calling the police on him to falsely accuse him of assault.
Jill Berquist, 38, was initially charged with falsely reporting a crime and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors. However, the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office dropped her first charge of falsely reporting a crime and has yet to say why.
The driver, Wesley Gakuo, caught the entire encounter on dash camera and cellphone video when it happened in April 2022. In the dashcam footage, Berquist is seen complaining on the phone with someone while telling Gakuo to take her uptown. She becomes visibly upset as Gakuo is driving and yells at him, “Go to uptown, motherf****r!” After Gakuo tells her not to call him that, she threatens to call the police.
Moments later, Gakuo is seen stopping and exiting the car, claiming that where they arrived was the destination point set on the GPS. Berquist is seen still yelling at Gakuo and takes a mounted tablet off the back of the front passenger seat and throws it out the window before also leaving the car.
Gakuo captured video on his cellphone, showing the rest of the encounter outside of the car where Berquist continues her tantrum and is seen screaming racial slurs and statements at Gakuo like, “You lowlife, f***ing n****r,” “Black n****r,” “Cops will f***ing string your s*** up you f***ing n****r!”
Then she calls 911 to report that a Black man punched her, calling Gakuo the N-word numerous times while she was on the phone with dispatchers. She also identified the make and model of his car and appeared to kick it.
A few moments later, a man who appears to be a resident of the community shows up to tell Berquist to leave the neighborhood and threatens to call the police on her.
After she gets off the phone, she tells the man, “I’m white, I live here. Black people don’t live here,” to which someone off-camera responds, “Excuse me?”
Berquist made no request for emergency medical personnel, and when police arrived, they saw no signs that she was physically hurt, even though she claimed Gakuo struck her on the left side of her face. Gakuo wasn’t cited.
It took Berquist more than a year to be charged because prosecutors didn’t learn of the incident until this past May. Her first court appearance was on July 11, and her next court date is set for Sept. 20.
Both Gakuo and Berquist spoke with Minnesota’s Star Tribune. Berquist admitted that she should have never called Gakuo those slurs but didn’t back down from her claims that he held her down and hit her. Berquist’s mother also chimed in and said her daughter “didn’t do anything wrong,” adding that Gakuo “did not take the designated route” to Berquist’s home.
Gakuo, 47, told the Star Tribune that he has never experienced a racist verbal outburst since moving to Minnesota. He’s originally from Kenya but moved to the States in 1999. He also said he doesn’t hold any hard feelings against Berquist.
