EDMONTON – Police have laid charges against a racist Edmonton woman, who was seen in a video hurling a racist tirade against an Indo-Canadian man in south Edmonton.
Angelique Barfield was arrested and released on Sept. 15. She has been charged with causing a disturbance for the rant and mischief for allegedly spitting on , Rahul Kumar’s vehicle.
In late August, Kumar, an HR professional who moved to Canada seven years ago, recorded the heated exchange he had with the 44-year-old woman in a parking lot at an apartment building in the city’s southeast.
During a two-minute-long clip, the woman can be heard calling Kumar a “Paki” with “sh*t-coloured skin.” She also tells him to “Go back to your f*cking country, man” and appeared to spit on his vehicle as she drove away in her own car.
At one point in the video, the woman mixes up two countries where she thinks Kumar is from before she mocks his accent.
“East Indian Paki,” she shouts at him. “Go back to your country, man,” she adds.
Towards the end of the video, she can be seen driving off, but not before she spits on the car of this Indo-Canadian man and calls him a “loser.”
Kumar said he was stunned by the woman’s profanity-laden rant and called it disturbing. “I’ve never experienced anything like that,” he said.
Kumar was concerned because the woman’s profanity-laden rant was within earshot of children.
“It is quite disturbing,” he said. Apart from this last month, an Indian-origin couple was harassed in Canada by a white man who yelled that ‘go back to your country’ and threatened to ‘kill’ their children.
For Kumar, the incident was even more disturbing because children, including his young child, were within earshot at the time.
For her part, Barfield appeared to be unapologetic when she called in to CTV Edmonton following the release of the video last month. She said she was “not a racist” and that she’s responsible for what she said.
“I can live with myself,” she said at the time. “I have no problem looking in the mirror… I love myself. I have no problem with what happened.”
Police said Barfield’s tirade was triggered by the parking lot confrontation and not by hatred so it’s not being called a hate crime.
“However, we would call this a hate incident because the hatred came in after the initial incident,” Sgt. Gary Willits from the Edmonton police’s hate crimes unit explained.
None of the allegations have been tested in court.
