Plano police said in a statement Thursday that Esmeralda Upton, 58, of Plano, was arrested and charged with felony and terroristic threatening charges. He was jailed on $10,000 bond. Rani Banerjee told Dallas television station WFAA that she and three friends had just finished dinner at a restaurant when Upton approached them in the parking lot. “Suddenly, we heard this woman calling us and started coming towards us. We were shocked by the racial slurs she used and her militant attitude,” Banerjee said. The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the attack. “The level of vitriol and the alleged physical assault against four Indian-American women in Plano is truly appalling,” Faizan Syed, executive director of CAIR-DFW, told the station. “This type of hate has no place in North Texas, and we call on law enforcement to investigate this incident as a hate crime.” The police statement says the incident is being investigated as a hate crime. Jail officials did not have an attorney for Upton. The collision happened shortly after 8pm on Wednesday. A widely circulated video showed Upton hurling a profanity at them, questioning their presence in the United States, threatening to shoot them and physically assaulting Banerjee, who was recording the confrontation on her phone. Violence against Asia has skyrocketed in recent years. Last year, six Asian women were among eight killed in shootings at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, fueling anger and fear among Asian Americans. Earlier this month, a man accused of shooting three Asian-American women at a salon in Dallas’ Koreatown was charged with a hate crime and other charges. And a West Texas man was sentenced to 25 years in prison earlier in August for attacking an Asian family outside a Midland department store in 2020 because he thought they were Chinese and therefore responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
