Oregon restaurant worker arrested after hurling slurs at Black customer
Kelly Roberts, 35, was arrested by Portland State last Monday on suspicion of menacing, second-degree criminal mischief and second-degree intimidation.
In the latest edition of “People in public places being racist,” an employee at a restaurant on the campus of Portland State University in Portland, Oregon is in jail he yelled obscenities and racial slurs at a customer along with threatening her with a chair.
Kelly Roberts, 35, was arrested by Portland State last Monday on suspicion of menacing, second-degree criminal mischief and second-degree intimidation.
According to The Oregonian, the customer, an unnamed Black woman, was eating dinner at the Pita Pit when Roberts began to call her names, including racial slurs, according to charging documents filed by the deputy district attorney.
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The enraged Roberts, according to court records, then picked up a metal chair and held it over his head while yelling profanities. He later grabbed the woman’s cellphone and smashed it, the records said.
When campus police responded, they said the man claimed that he was suicidal and wanted officers to kill him. He was taken alive.
He also reported to court officials he had been diagnosed with an unnamed mental illness, for which he was in treatment, according to an interview record.
The campus is still reeling from an officer-involved shooting in June that led to campus wide protests. Jason Washington, a 45-year-old Navy vet was killed after being shot nine times outside of a Portland bar where he was attempting to break up a fight.
He was holding an intoxicated friend’s gun when police arrived. He was told to drop the weapons before immediately being shot.
The officers were cleared of all wrongdoing. One of the officers who killed Washington, Shawn McKenzie, left the campus police for a new job with a different department.
Roberts, who is Asian American, was taken alive and booked into Multnomah County Jail. He was later released the following day pending trial.
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