A black man and his family kicked out of a Sausalito store last month while the shopkeeper telephoned police is calling for the city to enact a “zero tolerance” policy against such incidents, which he called racially motivated.

“I don’t want to hurt the man’s livelihood,” Bay Area resident Anthony O’Neill said of shopkeeper Hooshang Seda, proprietor of Quest Casuals clothing store at 673 Bridgeway. “But there should be zero tolerance for bigotry or assumed racism.”

Seda, however, has said in a handwritten note published online that the incident was not due to racism, but because O’Neill’s two children were trying on expensive clothes meant for adults and “messing around with the merchandise.”

O’Neill, 37, a creative director in the broadcast industry who recently moved his family to the Bay Area from Chicago to accept a new job opportunity, said he was, at the time, fearing the worst three outcomes between black citizens and police — “that I would be publicly handcuffed and humiliated, tased or shot.”

He said he has never had a confrontation with police before, but that “growing up as a black man in America, if a cop pulls you over for a traffic stop, your heart beats a little faster.” O’Neill said he was so unnerved that he captured the incident on cellphone video and posted it on Facebook, where it has so far received close to 350,000 views.

“That was my thought process,” he said on Tuesday of the July 22 incident, adding that he didn’t normally get involved in such events. “These three things could happen.”

Racism denied

Seda’s store has been closed since Saturday for unknown reasons and is due to open Thursday, according to a sign posted on the door. Seda could not be reached by phone, email, website or in person to give his side of the story.

However, he said in a written note he handed to ABC7 news TV station that his actions were not motivated by racism.

“I had a problem with them allowing a 5-year-old and maybe 6-year-old kids to mess around with the merchandise that did not fit this age,” says the note, photographed and attached to a Tweet and embedded in the ABC7 news story online. “When I say messing around, I mean the kids are putting the garments … on the floor and trying on adult beach hats.”

Julia Smith, shopkeeper at neighboring Firuzé women’s clothing store at 681 Bridgeway, said that while the incident was disturbing and should not be construed to be typical of the Bay Area or Sausalito, the video did not show what happened earlier when the children were trying on hats or clothes.

“The video is only showing one side,” she said. “It didn’t show the mess.”

O’Neill, however, strongly denied that his two daughters, ages 6 and 4, were making a mess.

“They were not unruly, they were not making a scene, there were no clothes on the floor,” he said Tuesday. “There were four adults there (O’Neill, his wife and in-laws) — he could have tapped one of us on the shoulder if he had a problem.”

Smith said if the problem was kids trying on adult clothes, Seda “should have handled it differently” by notifying the parents or telling the children that they needed to put the items down.

“He probably got flustered, and didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “Some people don’t know how.”

She said the incident was “definitely not racial, because he hired my best friend, who is a black woman. I’ve known him for many years, and he is definitely not like that.”

Seda is shown in the video saying, “I am not after trouble, sir. I am asking you to leave because I refuse to do business with you.” He is then shown on the telephone apparently calling police.

Emotional distress

Over the weekend, Seda appears to have attempted a reconciliation, posting a sign on the shop saying it was a “very unfortunate misunderstanding,” and that he “will be reaching out to (O’Neill) in hopes of having a conversation of mutual understanding in peace, sincerity and frien(d)ship.” The sign was still there on Wednesday.

In the handwritten note posted on Twitter, Seda said he is not racist and, in apparent reference to former President Barack Obama, said he “gladly voted two times for a man of color for the office and that should say it all about my racial sentiment.”

O’Neill said Wednesday he “didn’t know if (Seda) was a racist, but it felt like racism to me.”

Although O’Neill and his wife are both college-educated and employed professionally, they said no one, regardless of class or race, deserved to be treated that way.

“We are … professionals who have never been subjected to this type of a hostile environment, having traveled around the world,” the couple said in a letter to Sausalito Mayor Joan Cox. “To have this happen in our home country over clothes and hats that cost pennies is absurd.”

They said in the letter that the “emotional distress this has caused” the family, “trying to explain (Seda’s) actions to our kids, was not necessary, had he known how to treat all customers fairly.”

City investigates

Seda does not have a website, and is not a member of the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce, said chamber CEO Juli Vieira.

“We’re trying to reach him, too,” Vieira said Tuesday. She said she and Sausalito City Manager Adam Politzer planned to visit with Seda to get more details about what happened and to explain the city had an inclusive policy with all guests.

“We have thousands of visitors each weekend from every country in the world,” Vieira said in a written statement. “So appropriate customer service is an important priority.”

A top priority, she said, is to “ensure that visitors to Sausalito are treated fairly and consistently.”

“I can’t imagine in any circumstance where a business would talk to its customers, let alone a family, in the way this store owner did in the video,” Vieira said in the statement. However, she noted, “as we all know, there is always two sides to every incident.”

Smith, who said she has worked in Sausalito since 1997, insisted that she and other business people in town were “the friendliest” one could find anywhere — and that the incident at Quest Casuals should not be taken as impuning the whole city or the Bay Area.

“We are very international here,” she said Wednesday. “We have people coming here from all over the world — people of all colors. It’s a vacation area — that’s the kind of people you get. I care for my store; I care for this town.”

Sausalito police Chief John Rohrbacher said one of his officers responded to the store after 4 p.m. July 22, but there were no charges or citations filed.

“It was a ‘keep-the-peace’ call,” Rohrbacher said. By the time the officer arrived, O’Neill and his family had left the store but were still walking around the neighborhood. When the officer parked his patrol car about a block away, O’Neill came up to the officer and ‘said hello,’” Rohrbacher said. The officer spoke with O’Neill for a short time and then spoke with Seda as well.

“That was the end of it,” Rohrbacher said. “It was a peaceful resolution at that point.”

O’Neill said the Sausalito officer gave him a business card and told O’Neill to contact him if he needed any help.

“He was super friendly,” O’Neill said.

‘Racial inequity’

Area social justice leaders, however, say the incident indicates Marin County is not immune from the same kind of potential racial bias and fear reported across the nation earlier this year where black Americans are being called out or reported to police by white bystanders for participating in normal activities.

“It’s important that we don’t just let this go,” said Pat Johnstone of San Anselmo, a co-founder of Sanctuary Marin. She and others have complained about the incident to Sausalito officials and are considering some sort of public action, such as a vigil or demonstration.

“We need to have a broader conversation about racial inequity in Marin County,” Johnstone said. “It’s not an isolated incident — we will not remain silent.”

Johnstone said O’Neill was “brave enough to take a video and put it out there,” she said. “But how many other times are people of color made to feel uncomfortable in a store and watched as they walk around the store?

“We want to raise awareness. We want to be an inclusive and welcoming community.”

The Sausalito incident appears to be the latest in a series of events of similar dynamics across the nation. Those include an incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, a “Barbeque Becky” incident in Oakland, and one in San Francisco involving an 8-year-old girl selling water bottles near AT&T Park.

O’Neill said he and his family don’t want other people of color to experience the shame and humiliation — and fear — they endured.

“The idea that police were called for something like this — it’s so mundane,” O’Neill said. “They (his daughters) were just trying on hats, and they were harassed.”

He said he and his family are waiting to hear back from Sausalito officials about their meeting with Seda — and what, if any, resolution could be made in the matter.

If Seda agrees to make a formal public apology, and acknowledges that he could have handled it differently, that could help to shift the culture, he said.

“We want to hold them (the city of Sausalito) accountable,” he said. “We just want to know how they plan to deal with this.”