AIKEN, SC — Skhylur Davis, an 11-year old girl from South Carolina, says she was scared when her white neighbor assaulted her and falsely accused her of stealing her mail. Davis and her family believe the incident happened because she is Black.
Elizabeth Shirey, who is 38-years old, is facing charges of assault and battery for yelling at Davis and aggressively grabbing her arm as she was walking back from picking up her grandmother’s mail.
Shirey accused the young girl of stealing her mail. However, after checking the name and address of the mail, Shirey let the girl go, apologized, and offered her some cookies.
“It’s kind of an insult you think that… you can make up for that with cookies,” Davis told The Associated Press.
Moreover, Davis said she realized she was being racially profiled when Shirey’s husband, Justin, told her that if she were a “different type of person, it would have been a different story.”
The young girl’s grandmother, who lived in the neighborhood for a year, said she was shocked to hear about the incident. She was worried because she had always been asking her granddaughter to get her mail.
“She was violated,” Patterson said during the news conference, according to The Grio. “Growing up in the South, we had to endure this, our parents had to endure this. It’s 2020, we will not have our children go through what we had to go through.”
