A police report disputes a Georgia state Rep. who accused a man of making racist comments toward her during an encounter in a Publix grocery store.
Rep. Erica Thomas claimed she was in a Publix grocery store in Mableton, a suburb of Atlanta, when Eric Sparkes yelled racist slurs at her and told her to “go back where you came from.”
The encounter began when Thomas, a Democrat, took more than 10 items to a 10-items-or-less checkout lane. Sparkes told police he asked Thomas to go back to the lane where she came from. He admitted calling her a “b-tch” twice.
Thomas detailed the encounter in a video on social media that went viral due to the racist overtones. Social media users were already outraged after President Donald Trump told Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim, to go back to her country in Africa and fix the problems there.
“This white man comes up to me and says, ‘You lazy son of (expletive). You need to go back where you came from,'” Thomas said in the video posted on Twitter.com. Fighting back tears, Thomas said she calmly responded, “Sir, you don’t even know me. I’m not lazy. I’m nine months pregnant.”
But a witness who overheard the encounter between Thomas and Sparkes told a different version of the story, according to Channel 2 Action News.
The witness, a Publix employee, told a Cobb County police officer that she witnessed part of the conversation and heard Thomas “continuously tell Eric Sparkes to ‘Go back where you came from!'” but did not hear Sparkes utter those same words to Thomas. Sparkes is from Cuba.
Cobb County police said they do not intend to file hate crime charges against Sparkes based on the police report.
But Thomas’ attorney, Gerald Griggs, said the Cobb County police report is incomplete.
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