On Monday night a man left a dead cat in the parking lot of an Asian American butcher shop in Sacramento, FOX 40 reports.
Mad Meat Butcher Company, run by the Shum family, has been in business for nearly 30 years. The store’s current owner, Kelly Shum, says that this past year the business has been a target of increasing anti-Asian sentiment.
“Yeah, and it’s always something about like, ‘You guys are dirty or you’re diseased.’ And we get calls all the time like, ‘Oh, do you guys sell bat soup?’” Shum told FOX 40. “I feel like I have to work, like forty times as hard to be seen as on the same level as the other butcher shops in the area. So, we increased our social media presence, we hired a security guard who you see out front now. Like, that’s why. Most butcher shops, when you go in, you don’t see a security guard at the very front.”
On Monday night, a man in a grey t-shirt walked into Mad Meat Butcher Company and made a cash purchase. When he left, security cameras caught him leaving a box in the store’s parking lot on Florin Road.
Inside the box was a dead mutilated cat.
The store posted security footage of the man inside the store to their Facebook page. They asked for help in identifying the man.
In their post, the butcher’s shop said they had reported this incident as a hate crime. They hope that the individual is caught and “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Sacramento police do not have any additional information on the incident, according to FOX 40.
“I don’t think I can keep doing what I’ve been doing for the last year, which is keep my head down and try not to be public that we’re Chinese,” Shum told FOX 40. “And I don’t want to feel not proud of my culture, and I don’t want to not feel proud of the work that we do here because I am proud of the work that we do here. I’m proud of everyone that works here and I’m proud of the staff that we have and I’m proud of everything that we have here.”
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They need to start contacting the FBI and not just the police. Police will not look into it as a hate crime but the FBI have to investigate it that way.