A bizarre and racist attack on a San Francisco Muni bus was caught on camera Thursday morning.
Michelle Young, who took the video on her phone, said the man in a striped hoodie started yelling anti-Chinese slurs at her and another woman next to her.
When another man on the bus tried to get him to stop, the man in the striped hoodie started throwing eggs at him. The man then got off the bus, and he threw eggs through the window at people.
SFMTA told NBC Bay Area it's reviewing surveillance video and promising to do everything it can to investigate and find the man responsible for the attack.
The agency issued a statement that read in part: "We are committed to doing everything we can to stop the racist attacks on the AAPI community that have been on the increase over the past few years."
Young, who took the video which has now been shared widely on social media, said she is now filing reports with both San Francisco Police and SFMTA. Young was in town visiting from New York and as an avid transit rider, she was excited to ride the Muni bus in San Francisco.
She recalls that while she was riding the 38 bus at Geary and Divisadero, the man in the striped hoodie entered the bus and immediately started looking at Young and another Asian American woman seated next to Young.
"And he immediately said a racial epithet and it was 'stupid Chinese b----' and he said that at least twice," Young recalled.
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In Young's video, the man can be seen carrying a double pack of eggs on the bus.
Young said that she and the woman next to her ignored the things this man was saying to her and he walked away. She recalled there was some kind of "kerfuffle" where the man in the striped hoodie got upset at someone else, and another passenger stepped in and told him to stop.
The man in the striped hoodie can be heard saying to another passenger "do you want me to throw eggs at you?" and the seated passenger replies "no."
Young said another passenger pulled on the backpack of the man with the striped hoodie to hold him back, but the man wound up throwing an egg while on the bus.
Then, Young said the man in the striped hoodie exited the stopped bus and proceeded to throw eggs at the passengers through the open windows.
"So all the women around me, had egg all over their hair, there was egg shells everywhere," Young said.
Young said the final egg this man threw appeared to be directly at her through the closed window of the bus.
"This is unfortunately not the first time I’ve been the victim of some Asian racial hate verbiage," Young said, adding that this was the first time she thought to record the incident while it was happening.
"Afterwards I was pretty shaken," she said.
"There have been more attacks also more reported attacks," Young noted, addressing the rise in violence against Asian Americans in recent years.
"I would say I’ve never experienced anything like this before the pandemic started," she added.
Young said San Francisco is not the only place where she's been on the receiving end of racist remarks and that she shared her experience to shed light on this scary, new reality many Asian Americans are now contending with.
"If something like an egg incident can raise awareness of our daily struggle --sometimes just trying to get through our day, trying to get through public spaces-- hopefully that makes a change overall,” she said.
