Linda Dwire has been identified as the racist woman in a viral video that shows her accosting two Spanish-speaking women in a Colorado grocery.
The video footage, which has over 500,000 since being posted to Facebook at the time of this writing, shows Dwire verbally assault the two Spanish-speaking women at the City Market grocery store in Rifle, Colorado, on Monday, October 1.
According to reports, the racist situation began when Dwire overheard Fabiola Velasquez and Isabel Marin — two Mexican women living in Colorado — speaking in Spanish to each other. This caused Dwire to interrupt them to ask if the pair lived in the United States.
When Velasquez and Marin confirmed in the United States, Dwire told them they should learn English while continually raising the sound of her voice.
This is when Dwire was confronted by Good Samaritan Kamira Trent, who stood up for the two Mexican women by telling Dwire that you “do not harass people” and calling the cops.
Police eventually arrived on the scene and Dwire was arrested, taken to Garfield County Jail, and charged with two counts of bias-motivated harassment.
via Buzzfeed News:
Velasquez, who has been in the US for eight years and was accompanied at the market by her two daughters and son, told BuzzFeed News that Dwire was aggressive and kept putting her hand in her face.
Trent, who was also shopping in the aisle, said she overheard Dwire tell Velasquez and Marin, “You’re in America. You’re in my country. You can’t speak Spanish here. You need to speak English if you’re going to be in America.”
Trent said she initially tried to deescalate the situation, stepping between Dwire and Velasquez and reminding Dwire it was a free country and that she couldn’t tell the other women how to speak.
Dwire responded by telling Trent it wasn’t her business. After about 10 minutes, the conversation between Trent and Dwire had spiraled into a shouting match, and Trent called the police. Velasquez said she and her friend would likely not have called the police themselves.
Coincidentally, after the incident has died down and the three women shared a hug, Trent learned later that she had previously coached Marin’s daughter alongside her own on an extracurricular volleyball team.
When speaking about the incident, Velasquez said that it “felt good to see someone who was born here defend us that way.”
As for Trent, she said that anyone in a similar situation should “stand up and say something” because “letting that happen is really what’s wrong with our country.”
