Man arrested after anti-Muslim attack on McDonald’s customers: ‘You don’t deserve to eat here’
A Florida man was arrested on Wednesday after he reportedly attacked two men he believed to be Muslim or Middle Eastern with a stun gun and told them they didn’t “deserve” to eat at McDonald’s.
John Jay Smith, 60, got into a verbal altercation with the men before menacing them with a knife and later the stun gun, First Coast News reported. One of the men is an exchange student from Egypt.
The pair were eating hamburgers in an Augustine, Fla., McDonald’s parking lot on Wednesday.
{mosads} Smith reportedly approached them holding a switchblade-style knife.
“Get the f— out of here, you don’t deserve American food,” one of the victims claimed Smith said.
Smith then allegedly pulled out a stun gun, calling it his “zapper,” and reached inside the car in an attempt stun one of them, the outlet reported.
That action startled the driver, who accidentally backed the car into a light pole. The car’s back bumper suffered minor damage.
Police arrived and Smith was arrested. He was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, one count of burglary with assault or battery and one trespassing charge.
As he was escorted to the police car, Smith reportedly told the deputies that “they killed my son” and “my son was a Marine.”
“We don’t have any hard feelings toward him — I don’t know him — and we feel vulnerable and scared,” one of the men told the outlet.
Chuck Mulligan, a spokesperson for the St. Johns County Sheriff’s office, told First Coast News that Smith could face additional hate crime charges since he is believed to have approached the victims due to their appeared religion or ethnicity.
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