Email Share 1K Shares

An unidentified female suspect punched a gay man several times in the face while calling him a faggot in an unprovoked attack on July 2 inside a Safeway store at 5th and L Streets, N.W., according to an account the victim gave to D.C. police.

A police report says the suspect, described as an African-American woman appearing in her 20s, was last seen fleeing eastbound on foot in the 400 block of L Street, N.W., where one of the entrances to the Safeway store is located.

On Monday, D.C. police posted to YouTube a video of the suspect taken from at least three security cameras at the Safeway store, asking the public to help police identify her. The police report describes her as being between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing between 110 to 125 pounds, with brown eyes and a light brown complexion.

The victim, Mark Rutstein, a local Realtor, said Safeway employees told him they believe the suspect, who is a regular Safeway customer, might be associated with gang members at a nearby public housing project and that he feared for his safety.

D.C. police spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump told the Blade detectives have been assigned to investigate the case and are looking into whether “hate bias was a motive in this offense,” which police have listed as a simple assault.

Crump said police officials are also looking into why the officer who prepared the police report on the incident didn’t list the assault as a suspected hate crime, although he stated in the report that the victim said the suspect called him a “faggot” during the assault.

Rutstein told the Blade that three of the four officers who responded to the scene, including two from the department’s Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, acted in a highly professional and supportive manner. He said the GLLU officers responded to a text message he sent the unit asking for help.

But he said the officer that took the report, Michael L. Shipman Meyer of the First District, treated him in a hostile and disparaging way and appeared “extremely annoyed to have to take this report.” Rutstein said he filed a complaint against Shipman with both the police department and the city’s independent Office of Police Complaints.

“The complaint was sent to MPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau and it is under investigation,” Crump told the Blade in an email.

According to the victim, the incident started when he approached a customer service and checkout line and saw the unidentified woman standing near but not directly in the line.

“So I walked up to the side of her and I said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, are you in this line?’ And she looked at me as if she had more anger in her eyes than I have seen in a while,” said Rutstein, 40.

He said the woman didn’t say anything, prompting him to ask her one more time if she was in line. She again gave him an angry expression but said nothing. Then, seconds later, the woman backed into him with her shoulder, turned around and began punching him in the face while calling him a “faggot,” he said.

“I grabbed her dreads and I pulled her dreads down onto the floor and I restrained her in that position while she was continuing to try to punch my face but my reach was too far,” Rutstein said. “And I’m screaming for security and for them to call the police. All of the people on the line and working at the registers were frozen,” he recounted.

Seconds later security guards and an assistant manager rushed to the scene, he said. “They came at me like I was the assaulter and quickly told me to let go. When I did let go they did nothing to restrain her. They basically gave her the option to turn around and come back at me again.”

However, an assistant manager and two security guards instead escorted the woman to the front door of the store, allowing her to run away, he said.

“I told the assistant manager why aren’t you calling police? And he said if you want the police there’s the police station across the street,” Rutstein told the Blade.

Craig Muckle, the public affairs and government relations manager for Safeway’s Eastern Division, said he spoke to the store manager, who did not witness the incident but spoke to store employees.

“I’m hearing there was an effort to call police,” Muckle told the Blade.

He said that if a store employee told the victim the store could not call police in response to an incident such as this one, the employee is misinformed.

“If he was told that, it is not correct information,” said Muckle. “We don’t have a policy to prohibit that.”

Rutstein said he went to the police station across the street from the Safeway store and discovered the door was locked and no one answered a doorbell. He said he flagged down a police car on the street, and the officer in the car apparently arranged for Officer Shipman and another First District officer to arrive at the scene.

He said he also sent a text message to the GLLU. He said two officers from the GLLU arrived on the scene at the same time another two officers from the First Police District arrived.

He said GLLU Officer Justin Markiewicz and another officer requested and received permission from Safeway security guards to obtain a copy of the store’s security video footage that captured the assault and which has since been posted by police to YouTube.