Police Seeking Car That Hit Woman Who Stood in Front of It at Protest

A police car in a file photo. Mira Oberman/AFP/Getty Images

Police officers in Bloomington, Indiana, are searching for a driver who struck a woman standing in front of the vehicle during a protest late Monday.

Video footage from the scene showed an electric scooter lying on the street, blocking the road. A man exits the passenger side of a red Toyota, grabs the scooter, and throws it out of the way.

That prompted a woman to get in front of the car and try to stop it from moving forward.

The vehicle then began to accelerate, causing the woman to go up onto the hood of the car. Another person grabbed the car and clung to the side.

Both fell off when the vehicle turned from Walnut Street onto 6th Street, the Bloomington Police Department said in a statement sent to The Epoch Times.

The 35-year-old man suffered abrasions to his arms and the 29-year-old woman was rushed to the hospital with a laceration to her head.

Officers were provided with cellphone footage from several people.

Police were working to identify the driver and the passenger and locate their whereabouts, the statement said.

Police hadn’t found them as of Tuesday morning, a spokesman said.

People getting hit by vehicles during protests have become a regular occurrence; in some cases, police find the protesters at fault for obstructing roadways. It wasn’t clear if the driver was facing criminal charges.

One woman who witnessed the incident Monday said she couldn’t believe what unfolded.

“You see a human in front of the car, but this person just hit the gas as hard as they could and they kept going, and then they tried to throw people off the car at high speeds. It didn’t make any sense. I’ve never been that infuriated in my life. Like I was mad,” Erin Parks told WTHR.

Geoff Stewart, who said he was the man clinging to the car, said the vehicle came to a stop but the driver was revving the engine.

“We tried to stop her and let her know that the crowd is clearing up just wait a second,” Stewart told RTV 6. “But, she and her passenger both wanted to go right away so they started to push, they pushed into the woman that was with me and when she pushed again both of us went on the vehicle.”

People gathered on Monday to protest after Vauhxx Booker, a civil rights activist, claimed he was nearly lynched.

“I was attacked by five white men (with confederate flags) who literally threatened to lynch me in front of numerous witnesses,” Booker said in a Facebook post.

In a separate incident, a sheriff’s deputy in a neighboring county questioned and detained a black resident walking down the Bloomington street where they live “in an apparent example of racial profiling,” Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton and City Clerk Nicole Bolden said in a joint statement.

“These separate incidents exemplify the persistence of racism and bias in our country and our own community. They deserve nothing less than our collective condemnation. They require that we come together as a whole, and recognize that racism damages all of us, not just our residents of color,” they said.