A black woman who punched a random, innocent churchgoer during a Catholic mass in Philadelphia on Sunday will not be charged by the police even though there is clear video evidence of the unprovoked attack, according to the Daily Caller.
The incident was captured on video at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which was livestreaming its service. In the incident, two lectors reading from Scripture begin walking down the aisle between the pews, where the attacker – a black woman wearing a surgical mask – is standing in waiting. When the lectors get close, she suddenly punches one of them twice in the face.
While her victim simply keeps walking forward after flinching from the hits, the other lector, a young girl, runs away. The black woman then walks off after the lector who ran, and allegedly shouted something that could not be heard on the livestream. None of the churchgoers intervened, and the woman left the church shortly after the incident.
The Philadelphia Police Department confirmed that they had identified the woman on Monday, but after conferring with both the Catholic Church and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, determined that they would not file charges against the woman. The only reason given was that the woman allegedly has unspecified mental health issues.
The victim, Sarah Contrucci, said that she could see that the woman had “clearly seemed to be waiting there,” and she worried that the woman was “going to attempt to make a scene of some sort.” Contrucci says that she just wanted to return to her pew as quickly as possible, in order to “keep the situation calm and respectful.”
Despite the seemingly random nature of the attack, it has become increasingly more common for the far-left racial group Black Lives Matter to attack churches. In a viral video from June, a church in upstate New York was surrounded by Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters who shouted at and threatened multiple churchgoers, including a young mother with her child, and even attacked several of the churchgoers attempting to enter the building.