Police in Pembroke are looking for a group of teens accused of hurling racial slurs at an 80-year-old woman and then hitting her with a rock on her head, reports the Pembroke Observer.
The Ontario Provincial Police say this is the latest in a series of harassing incidents against the woman by the same teens who are also accused of vandalizing her home.
Thi Nga Doan received treatment at a local hospital and was released.
Her granddaughter, Cindy Tran, wrote about the incident in the Press Reader.
“Help me, somebody help me,” she said in broken English, Tran wrote.
She said the teens first threw eggs at the home she shares with her grandma. Then one of them then threw a stone at Doan, hitting her left cheekbone-“bruising her eye and rendering her blind for a few hours.”
“I was just shocked, but then I started sobbing because you don’t expect this to happen to an 80-year-old woman,” Tran said to cbc.ca. “This is not something that should ever even occur, regardless of how old a person is.”
Since then, Tran says the teens have returned twice to both throw eggs at the house and to bang on the door. Neighbors also confirm they have heard racial slurs being screamed at Tran’s grandma who immigrated to Canada after the Vietnam War.
Her husband died fighting in that war and she raised her daughter on her own and has helped raise five grandchildren.
“My [family] moved to this country for a better life but here we are in 2020 moving backwards more than we are going forward,” Tran said to the Pembroke Observer
Pembroke Mayor Mike LeMay is speaking out about the racial abuse.
“I strongly condemn the actions of the individuals involved, whose conduct is detrimental to the city we are working to create,” he said on Twitter.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated this incident happened in Ottawa)
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Pembroke is a small town (population <14,000). This is NOT the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada which is located 145 km away from Pembroke.
Hillbilly town. Nothing ever changes. Most people there have a 1920 mentality. I would move. Bancroft is nicer, Peterborough much nicer.