The father of the black teenager who was wrongly accused of stealing a woman’s iPhone says his son is “severely traumatized,” TMZ reported on Sunday.
Keyon Harrold, a Grammy-winning jazz musician, told TMZ that he was considering therapy for his 14-year-old son, Keyon Jr., after the incident at a hotel in New York late last month. Harrold told The New York Times that he thought it might have been the racial profile.
On December 26, Harrold posted a video, which now has nearly 3 million views on Instagram, showing a woman telling a manager at Hotel Arlo in SoHo that the teenager picked up her phone. Harrold said the woman grabbed and grabbed Keyon Jr.
“The lady in this video assaulted my 14-year-old son and I when we came down from our room at @arlohotels Arlo Soho for breakfast,” wrote Harrold in the caption. He added that the woman “‘lost’ her iPhone and, apparently, my son acquired it magically, which is just ridiculous.”
Harrold said the manager “empowered” the woman. He added that a few minutes later, an Uber driver returned the phone to the woman. He said he and his son had received no apologies from her or the hotel.
As Kelsey Vlamis of Insider reported, the hotel apologized after the footage generated outrage on social media. He said “more could have been done to lessen the dispute.”
“It could have gone very wrong if I had come down after my son,” Harrold told WABC-TV on Sunday. “The idea of trauma goes beyond any accusations we may have.”
He added: “I take my son to places where he shouldn’t have to deal with injustice and he shouldn’t have a profile”.
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Police identified the woman as Miya Ponsetto, 22, the New York Post reported on Friday. She told CNN that she is concerned with facing charges and how she was portrayed in the video.
“Of course I do. I’m not like that,” she said. “Actually … I try really hard to make sure that I’m always doing the right thing.” She also claimed that she was beaten during the incident, but did not provide evidence, CNN said.
The woman was not charged, but WABC-TV reported that the police were investigating the possibility of bringing charges against her, from assault to attempted theft. Activists said Ponsetto is a California resident and are calling for his arrest, the report said.
The civil rights lawyer Ben Crump and the teenager’s parents appealed to prosecutor Cyrus Vance to accuse Ponsetto. NBC News reported on Thursday that the prosecutor’s office was investigating the incident.
“There are thousands of black men in prison because they have been racially discriminated against and falsely accused, so that has bigger implications,” Crump said at a press conference on Wednesday. “I mean, it was Emmett Till, who was falsely accused and racially profiled, that led him to be lynched. And therefore, it is a broader conversation that has a greater impact on society.”
Read the original article on Insider