San Jose police are reportedly looking for a woman who they say intentionally coughed on a baby several times while standing in line at a frozen yogurt shop.
Police are seeking the woman on suspicion of assault in the Friday afternoon incident. Video shows the woman pulled down her face mask and repeatedly coughed forcefully in the the face of a baby seated in a stroller behind her before walking away.
“It happened so quick I was in shock,” said Mireya Mora, the baby’s mother, according to San Francisco’s ABC-affiliate KGO. “She got close, she took off her mask, and she coughed three times super hard on my son’s face.”
“Coughing on someone’s face. She did it on purpose it’s not like she did it on accident, oh cough, cough - no she purposely coughed on my son’s face.”
The woman had reportedly accused Mora and her baby of not following social distancing rules while in line, police said.
Mora, who is Hispanic, disputes that and told the station she suspects racism since the woman only became upset when she began speaking Spanish to her grandmother.
“I believe this woman may be racist because the family in front of her is white. Me and my grandma are Hispanic and she started telling me about my distance and harassing me and my son once I started speaking in Spanish to my grandma,” Mora said.
Police described the suspected cougher as “a white woman in her 60s, medium build, wearing a gray bandanna, glasses, long sleeve shirt with gray vertical lines, white dress pants and patterned tennis shoes.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued a mandatory face mask order in the state where there has been a resurgence of the covid-19 hospitalizations, according to the Associated Press.
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