A Florida mother says that an 81-year-old woman who faces felony charges for allegedly spraying bear mace at her daughters has been racially harassing her family for months on end since they moved next door.
Ada Anderson was arrested last month in Ocala, Florida, and charged with felony battery after allegedly calling two young girls, ages 3 and 6, a racial slur, then pepper-spraying them.
The children were playing with bubbles in their driveway when the incident happened.
Their mother, April Morant, stated that she saw Anderson holding a can of mace that she initially thought was a gun.
“She was saying something to us, but I wasn’t paying her any attention. I thought it was a gun in her hand, and it was the mace,” Morant told WCJB. “We all know it was mace because she started spraying it. It was like a big thing of bear mace.”
Morant and her daughters first moved into the neighborhood last November, and she said Anderson harassed them from the very start.
She said the 81-year-old consistently called her children names, which Morant told her daughters to ignore.
“I finally heard it myself like two days later, and she called me the N-word and we don’t belong in this neighborhood, and then my other daughter comes out and she’s like, ‘Oh, look at the whales,'” Morant said.
Everything came to a head with the macing incident.
According to an affidavit, Anderson told police that the children were running up and down the fence line that separated her house from theirs, and were yelling at her. She said she sprayed liquid at them, but claimed it did not touch them because they were 40 feet away.
Police found a brownish-orange liquid on the fence, grass, and the victims’ property. Morant and her children also told officers they felt discomfort and irritation in their noses and throats.
Now Morant is trying to move her family out of the neighborhood. She started a GoFundMe to raise donations to help fund her move to a new rental home.
“Since Day One, our next-door neighbor has targeted us with nonstop racial harassment, screaming slurs from her porch, telling us we don’t belong in the neighborhood, and poisoning the air with her hate,” Morant wrote on the fundraising page. “Now she’s finally been arrested and charged with 3 counts of battery. But I know this isn’t over. She’ll be out soon, and I truly fear what she might do next. We can’t stay here. I don’t want to wait for this situation to escalate even further.”
Marion County jail records reveal that Anderson was arrested in 2017 for stalking and in 2019 for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The 2019 arrest was reportedly connected to an incident with a previous neighbor in which she pulled out a gun.
The 81-year-old’s arraignment is scheduled for July 1.
