A man wielding a power saw menaced a Black woman looking for a parking spot on a side street in Hollywood, California. The suspect, who shouted racial slurs and slashed the woman’s car, is still at large and is facing battery charges.
On May 13, a young Black woman, who chooses to remain unidentified for safety reasons, was looking for a parking spot on Lodi Place, just a few blocks from the famous Sunset and Vine intersection, when she encountered a truck that was blocking the narrow road.
Her car was forced to come to a stop outside the storied Hollywood Studio Club, the historic all-female dormitory that was once home to Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and other Golden Era stars.
But that glamour is long gone. On this recent evening, the woman asked two white men to move their truck and received a torrent of hateful backlash.
The two men, both bald and wearing black T-shirts, reportedly began screaming profanities and racial slurs, including the N-word, local news station KTLA 5 reported. One of the men aggressively approached her open passenger side window, and the scary interaction was caught on video.
“He stuck his hand actually inside and reached at me and reached at my phone, and that’s when I took out my pepper spray and deployed it to mace him, and then he backed away,” she told the outlet.
But before she could breathe a sigh of relief, he soon returned. The suspect had gone inside the garage of a house under construction at 1228 Lodi Place, where the offending truck was parked, and grabbed a power saw, the woman described. Like a scene straight out of a horror film, he approached the woman and began wildly slashing at her car.
“I was just honestly too stunned to speak or move at that point, but I was still managing to record on my phone to hear what was going on,” she told the outlet while remaining off-camera to protect her privacy.
The man approached her passenger window again, but this time with the saw, and struck her car several times. In the chaotic video, you can hear the power saw’s metallic screech amid the woman’s panicked screams. “At that point, that’s when I decided to call 911.”
During the ordeal, it appears that the woman dropped her phone, and the attack itself is not visible, but she took photos of the damage to her car, which she estimates to be upwards of $1,000. Unfortunately, by the time the police arrived, the man with the saw had disappeared.
Authorities spoke to the other man involved, and according to his statement, he denied knowing the suspect. He indicated the man was not part of his construction crew, but a complete stranger who had been walking down the sidewalk and suddenly offered to help with his equipment, reported KTLA 5.
“I was terrified. I was stuck in fear, but I just knew from the moment that he made the first initial racial comment that I just had to record,” recounted the woman, who was shaken up but not injured during the attack.
The suspect, who is clearly visible on the video, is still on the loose, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. He is described as 5 feet 5 inches tall, in his 50s or older, with green eyes, a mustache, and a scar on his left middle finger.
