A Seattle member of Black Lives Matter is now facing hate crime charges against Asian-American women, as reported by the New York Post.
The suspect is 51-year-old Christopher Hamner, a black man, has been charged with attacking three different women over the course of last month, with their race appearing to be his motivation. The first incident took place on March 16th, with Hamner screaming expletives at an Asian woman named Pamela Cole, who was in her car with her two children in the back.
“The moment he made eye contact with me he stopped [his car], opens his door, and he’s screaming ‘F**k you, you Asian b**ch, f**k you!’” Cole recalled in a statement to local news outlet KIRO 7. “I was in complete shock. ‘Are you talking to me?’” She says that Hamner at one point began “charging at us,” which “was the scariest part for me.” She managed to take several photos of Hamner before driving away.
The second incident was on March 19th, once again while Hamner was driving, when he allegedly cut off two other Asian women on the road when he saw them, once again shouting racial slurs and expletives. According to the witnesses, he even threw a plastic object of some kind at their car and began charging them, but his face was captured on the car’s dashboard-mounted camera. That footage ultimately allowed the police to ID and arrest Hamner.
At his arraignment last week, Hamner pleaded “not guilty” to a single hate crime charge for the two incidents. His bail was set for $10,000. Hamner has been active in the Black Lives Matter movement in the Seattle area, having posted multiple pictures of himself at protests with various anti-police signs and slogans. He even briefly participated in the Anarcho-Communist “autonomous zone” known as CHAZ, which stood for less than one month and attempted to occupy six city blocks in downtown Seattle, before the police ultimately disbanded the occupation after multiple fatal shootings within the area.