SPOKANE — The man who reported that the University of Utah women’s basketball team was harassed by racists in Couer d’Alene last week said he tried to flag down a police officer on the street at the time of the incident.
In a March 21 dispatch call, recorded at 9:55 p.m., a man says he is reporting “almost a hate crime.”
“I need to speak with an officer or someone in some capacity as soon as you can,” he is recorded as saying on the voicemail. “… Because the behavior of some of your citizens is appalling.”
The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament in Spokane hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant on Thursday night, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them, according to a police report filed by a team donor.
When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, the police report said.
The alleged incident happened two days before Utah played South Dakota State University on Saturday before losing to Gonzaga by 11 points on Monday night.
“You know, you think in our world in athletics and university settings, it’s shocking,” Utah coach Lynne Roberts said at a news conference Monday night following her team’s loss. “There is so much diversity on a college campus, and so you’re just not exposed to that very often. And so when you are, it’s like — you know, you have people say, ‘Man, I can’t believe that happened.’ But you know, racism is real.”
When an unidentified Coeur d’Alene Police officer called the man back, he said many players on the team are people of color.
“That would be Black, which doesn’t seem to work too well here in this wonderful place,” the man says. He says two trucks, one black and one white, were harassing the players, calling them slurs.
“(They) were racing up and down your streets that nobody paid attention to,” he said. “I’m just appalled. I mean, appalled. That stuff may work here, I don’t know, but it doesn’t work.”
The man said someone attempted to flag down a police officer when the incident happened. According to Coeur d’Alene Police Capt. David Hagar, detectives have reviewed dashboard camera footage of that night and could not see any incident occurring. The dashboard cameras are only pointed one direction, so it’s possible whoever flagged the police officer down didn’t appear in the footage. Hagar said the person was wearing a distinctive jacket and would have appeared in the front of the camera visibly.
“The officer could have been going a different direction,” Hagar said. “It wouldn’t be captured if he was on the side (of the police car).”
In the dispatch call, the man states he grew up in the Northwest and it’s a “beautiful” area. But “there might be a stigma or history” behind Coeur d’Alene, he said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the area experienced an infiltration of white supremacists, which led to multiple Nazi parades and crimes by the Aryan Nations. The Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations said the alleged incident was “once again a stain in our community that we have worked so hard to erase since the early days of the Aryan Nations.”
“But let’s just put that in the past,” the man says in the audio. “We just experienced that, and let me tell you, there are petrified young ladies that are here for a basketball tournament to play nationally televised games … You can’t control what the hillbilly white trash people do … This is such a bad look … And they’re afraid, and I’m not being dramatic.”
The man said the team got to dinner at Crafted Taphouse on Sherman Avenue around 5:30 p.m., which is when their reservation was, according to general manager Junior Mujtaba. The team ate for around two hours and left. Mujtaba said he could tell something was wrong when the players were eating dinner, but still in high spirits. He said the team left at around 7:15 or 7:30 p.m.
“They had to have been waiting,” the man said in the recording. “Because as soon as we got out, they were back. I’m not exaggerating.”
Hagar said the department was unable to speak with the Utah team after the incident. As of Tuesday, the police department has spoken with one Utah administrator, but the school hasn’t provided access to the team. They were not given a reason, Hagar said.
“We believe we’ve worked through that, though,” Hagar said previously. “We are sending someone down to Utah to work with our federal counterparts.”
On Thursday, Hagar said one of their officers’ plane landed in Salt Lake City in order to speak with the players who were subject to the harassment.
“We have things scheduled,” he said.
The department has one video related to the harassment and is asking the public for more.
If anyone is arrested for the alleged incident, the charges would likely be filed as malicious harassment, disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, Hagar said. The Coeur d’Alene Police Department is working with federal agents to determine if there are any hate crime statutes applicable.
