Screenshot courtesy of Frederick Joseph on Twitter
Brooklyn resident Emma Sarley is out of a job after a video showing her feuding with a Black couple in a dog park went viral.
Frederick Joseph and his fiancée Porsche Landon ran into Sarley while walking their dog on Saturday night, per The New York Post. He posted a short clip of the argument on Twitter and claimed Sarley was making racially charged comments. The comments were not filmed.
“At the dog park in Brooklyn with my fiancé and this white woman was threatening to call police and told us to ‘stay in our hood’ because she had our dog confused with another dog who had been barking loudly,” Joseph tweeted. “So, I started recording, and she tried to slap the phone out my hand.”
In the video, Joseph confronted Sarley and got witness Steve Tracy to verify that she made the remark.
“I’m sorry, you were right here watching this entire thing. Did she not just stand here and tell us to stay in our hood?” Joseph asked Tracy, who is white.
“She did,” he replied.
The video was only 27 seconds long, and it did not capture the entire incident.
“She’s like, ‘You’re not from around here. Go back to your hood. Stay in your hood. Stay in your hood,’” Joseph told CBS New York. “So I’m like, ‘Stay in my hood?’ Right, like? ‘You’re racist right now,’ and she’s like, ‘I’m not being racist.’”
“She was saying a lot of things, and that’s when, like, finally, like, ‘You guys need to take your dog out of here. You people shouldn’t even be here,’” Landon said.
Tracy also had an issue with Sarley’s comments.
“As those words were coming out and things started to unfold, it was pretty obvious to me, like, this is… this is not OK,” Tracy told CBS New York.
Sarley tried to explain herself, but her story didn’t make a lick of sense.
“My reference to ‘back to your hood’ only referred to another dog park outside of this neighborhood park,” Sarley said in a statement to The New York Post.
“I was frustrated and upset, but to be clear – I had no intended racial undertones in my comments whatsoever,” the statement continued. “I said it because it’s an unstated rule at our local park that when a dog is being aggressive, owners immediately remove them so it can be a calm, welcoming environment for everyone else.”
Joseph’s video has been viewed almost 775,000 times as of publication. Sarley was eventually identified along with her employer, Bevy, a software company. Her explanation wasn’t good enough for her boss.
Derek Anderson, CEO of Bevy, announced Sarley’s termination on Sunday.
“[Bevy] has zero-tolerance for discriminatory behavior of any kind,” Anderson tweeted. “Yesterday, an employee engaged in behavior contrary to our values and has been terminated. We apologize deeply to all involved.”