One May evening in 2022, two Filipino women — mother and daughter — went to pick up snacks at a McDonald’s drive-thru in North Hollywood when a white man allegedly rear-ended their car, drove alongside them and began to shout racial slurs, threatening to kill them.
Nerissa Roque, the mother, called the police and husband Gabriel Roque, who showed up before officers did. As daughter Patricia recorded on her cell phone, the attacker tried to open her locked door, the video showed, pushed Gabriel Roque to the ground — breaking his rib — and grabbed Nerissa Roque by her throat. A bystander intervened and stopped the assault, according to news reports.
Police did not arrest the man, Nicholas Weber. He instead received a citation to appear in court and later was charged with two felony batteries with hate crime enhancements. But a year later, the judge dropped the hate crime enhancements and charged Weber with two felony assaults and driving under the influence.
The family was stunned.
“I went there with the hope that the court would shed more light to what happened to us,” Gabriel Roque said at a July 2023 community panel on stopping Asian hate. “Instead of getting the truth out, the truth was twisted; therefore, justice was not served.”
The Roques’ violent experience follows a national trend stoked in part by anti-Asian rhetoric amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But prosecuting hate crimes successfully is rare, leaving victims disappointed.
To convict someone of a hate crime, the offense must be motivated by a person’s prejudice against an individual’s “race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity,” according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the Roques’ case, the court concluded the evidence was insufficient for a hate crime charge due to the defendant’s actions toward a non-Asian bystander and the fact that the racial slurs took place approximately…
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