Summary: A white woman who was caught on camera beating a black teenager has been charged with assault.
A 38-year-old woman was charged with assaulting a black teenager who had visited the neighborhood pool. The woman had been caught on tape harassing the teenager and his friends before she began hitting him.
In the tape, “Pool Patrol Paula,” as the internet has nicknamed her, hit a black teenager at least twice. The footage showed her telling the teenager to “Get out!” before threatening to call 9-1-1 and calling him and his friends “punks.”
The teenager said that he and his friends were invited to the Reminisce Community pool in Summerville, South Carolina on Sunday when Stephanie Sebby-Strempel approached them, demanding they leave. The boys said that even though they were invited by a community member they were about to exit when the woman physically attacked one of them.
The unnamed victim said that he and his friends were leaving peacefully at Strempel’s request but she continued to verbally harass them.
Strempel was charged in Dorchester County court on Tuesday with one count of third-degree assault and battery and two counts of assaulting, beating, or wounding a police officer while resisting arrest. Local media said that she was arrested on Tuesday and had pushed a police officer, hurting his knee, and bit another officer.
Strempel is being held on $65,000 surety bond.
The victim’s mother Deanna RocQuermore said that this situation “should have never happened. It was taken out of context and out of control.”
“No child including mine or anybody else’s ever, ever, deserves that type of abuse or treatment,” said RocQuermore. “And to be struck not once, not twice, but three times by someone that is upset because of the color of someone’s skin, and they don’t belong at their swimming pool.”
Strempel is a member of the United States Coast Guard and a seller of Rodan & Fields cosmetics. She has declined to speak to the press. Her lawyer said in court that, “There are certainly more than one side of the story on that charge.”
The video of Pool Patrol Paula went viral after it was uploaded by a relative of the victim, Rhe Capers, and it shows a growing trend of hostile white people harassing African-Americans in public.
“The video sparked outrage online, where the woman was dubbed “Pool Patrol Paula,” with the hashtag #PoolPatrolPaula. It follows several other widely publicized incidents of white people confronting or calling the police on black people who weren’t breaking the law, including a group holding a barbecue in a California park, two men waiting at Philadelphia Starbucks, and a child selling bottles of water in a San Francisco neighborhood,” CBS News said.
