The video of a woman, dubbed #KuKluxKaren, screaming racial slurs and threats against Black people at a CVS in Los Angeles this week has been viewed over 2 million times and shared over 20,000 times since it was first posted on Sept. 25.
In the footage, the woman is seen screaming in the entrance of the CVS on Colorado Boulevard as well as while she walks out to her car.
“I hate [n-word]s!” the woman yelled. She also repeatedly used the n-word to exclaim that she “would kill” and “lynch” Black people.
“I would kill a [n-word] but the law says I can’t kill the [n-word],” the woman yells in the parking lot, directly facing the cell phone camera. “If the law didn’t say I couldn’t kill all the [n-word]s, they’d all be dead.”
Since the video was posted, the police have begun investigating it as a “hate incident,” The Washington Post reported. And she has a new name: #KuKluxKaren, following the recent trend of giving racist white people caught on video nicknames.
“We are committed to maintaining a welcoming and diverse environment in our stores to help ensure that all customers are treated with respect and dignity,” CVS said in a statement after the incident, according to the New York Post. “We condemn, in the strongest terms, the behavior of the customer seen in the recent social media video.”
Though the woman has not been publicly identified by law enforcement, a man who identified himself as her former neighbor told KTLA that she has a history of restraining orders and her name is Heather Patton.
“We had to file restraining orders against her and her husband for warning to … threaten us, to assault us. They were yelling racial slurs,” the former neighbor told KTLA.
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Renée Saldaña, a witness, told BuzzFeed News that she could feel “violence in the air” and so she started filming.
“This woman, who looks like anyone you could see at a PTA meeting or next to you in yoga class, is out here terrorizing people in CVS,” Saldaña said.
Saldaña told BuzzFeed News that she called the Los Angeles Police Department to file a report after the woman left the CVS but hadn’t heard back as of Thursday.
