Wendy Drew spoke publicly on Thursday about the attack she endured on Sept. 1.
Drew, who is Black, shared the story of how she was followed by a man through San Francisco’s Financial District as he called her racial expletives in front of a small audience largely made up of local politicians and law enforcement officials seated in the pews of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco.
When she turned around to confront the man, she said he began pummeling her.
“Why are you calling me this? Why are you hitting me?” Drew recalled asking him. “You’re not going to get away with such attacks.”
The assault follows a string of other racist incidents reported in San Francisco over the past few months. In May, the home of dog walker Terry Williams was burned. Before the fire gutted his Alamo Square home, Williams had received packages that contained racist slurs, death threats and a doll painted in blackface, according to previous KQED reporting.
In June, racist graffiti was painted next to the front doors of City Hall. And just last week, an anti-Black slur was graffitied on a building at a city-owned playground. The slur appeared to be directed at Youth 1st, an organization that uses the space for summer and after-school programs.
On Thursday, San Francisco resident Irvin Lara-Rivera was charged with multiple hate crimes for allegedly calling Drew a racial slur before beating her. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged Lara-Rivera, 31, with assault likely to cause great bodily injury and battery with serious bodily injury.
Both charges carry special hate-crime allegations. Lara-Rivera, who also goes by Irvin Rivera-Lara, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon.
“Hate crimes have no place in our community and must be addressed swiftly by the criminal justice system,” Jenkins said in a press release. “Attacks like this demean and degrade individuals while also shaking whole communities.”
At Third Baptist Church, Drew described how she fought back by dragging Lara-Rivera into a convenience store in the hopes that he would appear on surveillance footage. Her boyfriend and several others heard her screams and ran into the store, holding the suspect until the police arrived.
Drew, a chef who has appeared on a Netflix reality show about cooking, was born in South Africa in 1980 and said her experiences growing up during apartheid made her especially vigilant about racism and discrimination.
“Please make these streets better for people of color, for women in general,” Drew said. “I love this city, and this incident has put fear in my heart. I’ve been here for close to 20 years. We just need San Francisco to be a safe place again.”
Jenkins also spoke at the event, which the SF NAACP organized.
“We have not only seen a rise of hate crimes against Black people in the city, we’re seeing them overwhelmingly across many different races and ethnicities,” she said. “This is becoming the culture of San Francisco, and it’s up to us — people who have a history of fighting against it our entire existence in this country — to make sure that it ends here.”
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