A video recently posted to social media showed a heated confrontation in a suburban Cleveland Walmart parking lot after a white woman accused a Black teenager of stealing her wallet, denying that her accusation was racially motivated, but saying he “looked guilty.”
The boy’s mother, Penny Thompson, posted the video to her TikTok page.
The clip shows Thompson and the woman in the middle of an argument over the theft accusation as two Walmart employees stand by and watch in the parking lot of the Mentor, Ohio, store.
Thompson asks the workers to check the store’s surveillance cameras to prove her 15-year-old son didn’t steal anything, while accusing the woman of making racially motivated allegations.
The woman insists that her accusation has nothing to do with skin color, but provides no evidence proving that the teen stole the wallet.
“I don’t care what color you are, he looked guilty!” the woman yells.
“Guilty of what?!” Thompson shouts.
The woman then tells a man in a truck that she’s waiting for Thompson to hit her.
Thompson tells the woman to go home, then addresses the store employees, asking them to intervene and stop the harassment.
One worker merely tells Johnson to put her items away.
“Why are they harassing me, though?” Thompson asks.
“Uh, that, I have no idea,” the employee responds, before walking over to the woman to question her.
The back-and-forth continues, and Thompson continues to hurl heated barbs. But the woman continues to assert that the boy is a thief.
“You can act like it’s because you’re Black, but it’s not. He knows he’s guilty,” the woman states.
At that point, the teen interjects and accuses the woman of rage-baiting. The video ends after the woman is heard reciting the letters on the license plate of a car belonging to Thompson and her son.
It’s unclear how the incident ended, but Thompson confirmed that the woman called the police.
In one comment posted under the video, she also criticized the store employees who responded to the situation, stating they could have done more to help.
“We were just shopping and harassed. We got a 55 in tv no body even helped us until that Karen started showing out then we had an entire audience in the parking lot,” Thompson wrote. “It’s a criminal offense to make false police report those employees could have help a lot more.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated that the incident occurred in Memphis, Tennessee. It has since been corrected to reflect the accurate location.
