Pittsburgh activist facing criminal charges over social post about gas station fracas
A Pittsburgh gas station employee who was charged with assault after video of him and his coworkers attacking two Black women went viral now says he’s in fear for his life due to the ongoing public outrage, including a social media post that apparently targets him.
Exxon gas station owners Sukhjinder Sadhra, 35, and Balkar Singh, 40, and gas station employee Scott Hill, 50, were each arrested in the Sept. 20 beating of two Black women identified as Jamila Regan, 25, and her sister Ashia Regan, 27 over a dispute about a malfunctioning gas pump that escalated.
But after a series of demonstrations over the incident, one prominent voice is facing criminal charges over a social media post about what happened.
READ MORE: Gas station owners in violent video attack two Black women over pump dispute
CBS Pittsburgh reports community activist Amber Sloan has been charged with misdemeanor harassment for threatening one of the men in the viral video.
“I put up a post and said two people shot out in Homewood today. All these killers out here, we need some of y’all out here. Y’all should be hunting down that white man Scott hill and killing him,” Sloan allegedly said on her Facebook page. “If y’all want to do something, but yeah it wasn’t nothing bad. Ya know so I’m blocked out from my main page.”
When authorities informed Hill of the video threat, he revealed he was already aware of its existence and has been afraid to stay in his own home. Given how high tensions have been in this case investigators took the video to the on-duty assistant district attorney, who determined that a harassment charge was appropriate.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the two sisters told authorities that after gas spilled at a pump, they requested a refund from the store. But the request turned into an argument, which snowballed into a physical confrontation. The melee was captured on video and shows the two owners and the employee beating the women to the ground. Community outrage was swift and the gas station has been closed since the incident.
READ MORE: Calls for boycott after gas station employee brags about charging n***ers more
The Regan sisters are now said to be in distress over the event, despite their alleged assailants being charged.
“Emotionally they’re terrible and physically they’re in pain,” said their cousin, Annette Regan at a demonstration last week. “They’re not feeling good at all. These are girls who have careers and jobs. One just got her associate degree and she’s back in school to get her bachelor’s. They’ve been through a lot and lost their mother to cancer years ago.”
In their first public statement since the incident, also last week, the sisters expressed the trauma they experienced.
“We shouldn’t have to be put through that, because we’re hard-working young ladies and we were just out trying to get us some gas,” Ashia Regan said, according to the Post-Gazette. “We weren’t looking for no trouble, we weren’t looking for no problems and now this is something we’re going to have to deal with, probably for the rest of our lives.”
