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A woman riding past a teen soccer game on a golf cart in Ponte Vedro, Fla., last weekend decided to call the police on a man who was shouting out to his son on the field, say eyewitnesses.
Ginger Galore Williams, whose child is also on the team, captured the incident on camera and posted it to Facebook on Sunday. Williams implied that the act was racially motivated, as the woman on the golf cart is white and the soccer dad is black.
She reports that the incident happened after the referee made a call that the man’s son wasn’t happy with. After the dad yelled out to the boy, “The ref is right!” the unidentified woman — seemingly a passerby not involved in the game — decided to confront him and “remind him that harassment would not be tolerated.”
When the dad tried to explain that she must be mistaken because he was only talking to his son, the woman refused to back down, according to Williams. The man offered to leave in an attempt to de-escalate the situation, at which point the woman — now known as “Golf Cart Gail” — whipped out her phone and let him know she was calling the police “because she no longer felt safe with his threatening behavior.”
That’s when Williams grabbed her own phone and hit record. In the video she posted to Facebook, the frustrated man can be heard explaining to the woman that he wasn’t talking to her — he wasn’t even talking to the refs. “I talked to my son, and I still get this from you?” he asks. The woman then calmly brings her phone to her ear.
In the video, Williams explains to the camera that the man was standing right next to her at the game when “this woman decides to butt in somehow.” At this point another woman, off camera, is heard telling Williams, “Ma’am, you can leave too,” and Williams fumbles with the camera as if shoved. “You’re gonna have to move me. The cops are going to have to move me,” she says, refusing to leave the situation.
In the Facebook post, which Williams titled “Soccer While Black,” she wrote, “What makes this even worse is that a parent had actually been ejected from this game during the third period. There had to be a delay of game due to the disturbance yet, Golfcart [sic] Gail didn’t need to call the police on him [the other man]. Why weren’t the police called? What was the difference? I’ll give you a guess.”
A second witness, Maria Morales-Walther, replied to Williams post, confirming her account of the incident. “At no point was he aggressive,” Morales-Walther said in a comment on Williams’s post, agreeing that the dad was simply reminding his son to be a good sport. When he tried to explain the situation to the woman on the golf cart, she allegedly told him to sit down, but continued to argue his innocence, she says. She also recorded the disturbance on video, and the woman on the golf cart can be heard trying to kick her off the field too. “You can tape yourself, as you’re walking out,” she can be heard saying, according to First Coast News.
When cops arrived on the scene, Williams began recording again. In a second, almost five-minute video, the woman, now off her golf cart, explains to an officer that she was doing her job. According to Morales-Walther, the woman’s job was to serve on the Ponte Vedra Athletic Association, although she claims she had to piece that together because the woman never identified herself to parents. When officers arrived on the scene, the woman allegedly told them she “feared for herself and the children because she didn’t know what he [the father] was capable of.”
On the video, two officers can be seen trying to defuse the situation, first listening to the man’s version of events, then listening to the Athletic Association rep’s account. All the while, Williams continues to record — even when the woman threatens to stop talking until cameras are turned off. Finally, one of the officers lets the dad leave, saying, “I don’t have any reason to detain you.”
Gary Easom, president of the Ponte Vedra Athletic Association, later told First Coast News that the altercation is being publicly “mischaracterized” and that it has to do with parents behaving badly. “This happens more times than I would like,” he told the outlet, adding that parents are not supposed to be approaching their children during soccer games.
But Williams isn’t buying it. She wrote on Facebook:
“Shame on you Golfcart Gail for what you did to this man and to the children who had to see this. Can you imagine how afraid his child must have been to see this happening?! Do you know how quickly in America a situation can go wrong? You probably don’t care Golfcart Gail, because you have the privilege of not caring. Thank you to the officers who did respond for listening to everyone and making sure the situation was dissolved safely. So long as this s*** continues to happen, I will continue to speak out against it. Black Lives Matter. Don’t ask me again why I kneel.”
Yesterday there was an article about a white woman who tried to prevent a black man from entering the apartment building where he lived. He recorded the incident.
I don’t know if these incidents are happening more now or that more are being recorded. Either way it shows a blatant racism that far too many of Trump’s base would support.
". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast
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