An elementary school teacher faces assault charges for allegedly attacking another woman at a Sam’s Club in South Carolina after calling her a racial slur.
The incident took place on Feb. 14 at a Sam’s Club warehouse store in Columbia.
In a news release, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department said they were dispatched to the store to respond to reports of an assault.
When deputies got there, the victim told them she was in the checkout line when a woman called her a racial slur, triggering a verbal dispute between the two women.
The victim reported that when she attempted to take a photo of the woman who used the slur, the woman punched her in the face, which set off a physical fight between them.
The woman who initiated the altercation left the scene before law enforcement arrived.
Four days after the incident, deputies located and arrested the woman, identified as 42-year-old Ashley Murff, who works as a fourth-grade school teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina.
She was charged with assault and battery in the third degree, according to WACH.
A friend of the victim told the news outlet about how the altercation actually unfolded from an attempted good deed.
“There was an elderly lady that didn’t have the ability to stand in line, and my friend offered to just get a chicken for her,” T’Nae Parker said. “People are allowed to do that. You’re allowed to get more than one chicken.”
Parker said the situation seemed to rile Murff, and she called the victim a racial slur twice.
“That’s when she called her the racial slur,” Parker said. “She called her the racial slur twice, the N-word, and she said it twice.”
Parker said her friend is still recovering from the assault’s physical and emotional toll.
“She’s shaken up, physically, you know, she was punched in the face. She’s had headaches,” Parker said. “And also, just the mental toll of it, it’s just unbelievable.”
Parker added that she’s concerned about how Murff’s views potentially impact her role as a teacher.
“The situation highlights why it matters what people believe in, the biases that they carry,” she said. “Those beliefs don’t just exist in private. They show up in classrooms.”
Investigators reviewed surveillance footage from the store that revealed that Murff was the aggressor in the incident and took out a warrant for her arrest.
She was booked into the Alvin Glenn Detention Center.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District has not yet released a statement on the matter.
Racist verbal abuse has often led to physical fights in other cases similar to this one.
Earlier this month, cellphone footage caught the moments a woman spewed racist slurs before slapping a Black man at a convenience store in Dallas, prompting the man to hit her back.
In January, a viral video showed a man hurling racial slurs, triggering a physical confrontation outside a San Francisco bar in which bystanders jumped to the victim’s defense.
In December 2024, a brawl broke out at an Atlanta bar after someone called a group of Black band members the N-word.
