“He tried to run us down on the sidewalk and lied to us,” the alleged perpetrator told the boy's mom. But video from his GoPro camera tells a different story.
An 80-year-old California woman has been charged with assault after she was seen on video pushing a kid riding his bicycle on the sidewalk.
“Get the hell off the sidewalk, now!” Susan Garcia tells the 12-year-old boy, while appearing to shove him backward.
The encounter was captured on the boy’s GoPro camera in an upscale gated community in Santa Ana.
“Excuse me? Please don't touch me. Why'd you just hit me?” the boy responded.
“Want me to hit you again?” the woman responded.
Garcia then headed to the boy’s front door to speak to his mom, Whitney Gregory.
“You hit my child? Are you serious?” Gregory said.
“He tried to run us down on the sidewalk and lied to us,” Garcia said.
But video from the camera tells a different story. The boy stopped his bike well before reaching her on the sidewalk.
“It's a great thing that there's a camera strapped to his chest,” the boy’s mom says.
“Good! Come on boy! Just giddy-on. Let me see it!” Garcia said.
Gregory tells Inside Edition that she had told her son to ride on the sidewalk.
“As you can see, he still has a scab from almost getting hit by a car. He had to stop really fast and flew off of his bike and got pretty scraped up. So I was a little bit paranoid and said, ‘Jeffrey please, just stay on the sidewalk. I don’t want you out on the street,’” Gregory said.
It's not the first run-in the family and others in the neighborhood say they have had with the woman, who is a member of the local homeowners association. After looking at the video, Gregory called the police, and Garcia was charged with assault.
Garcia is now being dubbed “Sidewalk Karen” on social media. She didn’t answer when Inside Edition knocked on her door.
“You’re not really supposed to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk, but unless you’re in willful disregard of somebody’s safety, it’s not a violation of the law. The video shows he wasn’t at fault. She was the aggressor,” legal analyst Royal Oakes said.
