Man with metal post trashes North Carolina convenience store, yells anti-Asian slurs

A man wielding a large metal post destroyed a convenience store in Charlotte, N.C. while yelling anti-Asian slurs last week, according to the store’s owners.

Surveillance footage of the incident shows a man coming into the store slamming a rack of products down and bashing in the glass doors of the store’s refrigerators with the metal post. He is also seen hitting a barrier in front of a counter near employees.

Several patrons are seen fleeing the store at the start of the incident. 

The store, called Plaza Sundries is owned by a Korean couple. It is located in the downtown area of the North Carolina city near its main transit hub.

“When my husband got the call (about the attack), it was like a routine,” Grace Lee Sung, the wife of the son of the store’s owners, said, The Associated Press reported. “He was like, ”Okay, check the mess. See the surveillance. File the (police) report.” 

Lee Sung said the coronavirus pandemic has fueled racist incidents in the store. Her in-laws have lived in the U.S. for decades since immigrating from South Korea.

“It’s like, ‘Hey, you’re different,’” she said. “‘You obviously can’t be from around here. Go back to your country.’”

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police confirmed that 24-year-old Xavier Rashee Woody-Silas was arrested in connection to the attack by a private security company G4S, which is responsible for security at the transit center, according to multiple reports.

Woody-Silas was charged with disorderly conduct, injury to personal property, resisting a public officer and felony robbery with a dangerous weapon, in addition to other charges, according to online arrest records.

A GoFundMe for the store has raised over $36,000 stores.

In the description of the fundraiser, Lee Sung said another person also came into the store during the incident and yelled “That’s what you get! That’s what you get!”

“My husband’s parents get spit on, stolen from, threatened, and verbally AND physically attacked on a daily basis. Filing police reports are part of the daily routine at their store in the public transit,” Lee Sung wrote.

“Things have gotten exponentially worse since the pandemic. Business is harder. People are angrier. Simply requesting customers to keep in compliance with the mask mandate frequently results in physical altercations,” she continued. 

The U.S. has seen an uptick in anti-Asian violence over the last year. A recent study from California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism showed that hate crimes against Asian Americans in 16 of the country’s largest cities spiked nearly 150 percent in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic.