A New York woman is facing backlash this week after she called the police on a black child and falsely accused him of groping her.
Surveillance footage first released by the New York Post inside a Brooklyn deli showed a 9-year-old boy walking past a woman, Teresa Klein, with his mother earlier this week.
{mosads}The boy can be seen wearing a backpack and carrying a large plastic bag.
Klein quickly turns around and can be seen shouting across the deli and later arguing with the boy’s mother. The conversation quickly turned sour, ending in Klein calling the police outside of the store, according to reports.
“I was just sexually assaulted by a child,” Klein can be heard saying in a video that Jason LittleJohn, a New York resident, posted on Facebook. The video had garnered 4.7 million views as of Friday evening.
The video also shows the 9-year-old boy and another child crying as Klein makes a call to the police. Bystanders can be seen confronting Klein about the incident.
The New York Times reported that Klein returned to the store on Friday and watched the bodega’s security camera footage from the incident. She reportedly issued an apology to the young boy while speaking in front of a television reporter’s camera after seeing that he did not grab her.
“Young man, I don’t know your name but I’m sorry,” she said, before denying that she held racist feelings.
“A woman charged at me and flashed a badge and said that she would arrest me,” she said, “and I called 911.”
Similar incidents involving white people calling police on black people have garnered widespread attention this year. In one instance, a white woman later dubbed “BBQ Becky” called the police on a black family that was grilling in a local park.
In another instance, a Starbucks employee called police on two black men in April after the two sat in the coffee shop without purchasing anything while waiting to meet someone. The incident led the company to announce it would close all company owned stores for an afternoon to conduct racial bias training.