While I Was Buying Bananas, A Lady Asked, “Is That For Your Baby Monkey?”

The Attack and Immediate Abduction

While I was buying bananas, a lady asked, “Is that for your baby monkey?” “Yeah.” “And the other chimpanzees at my zoo”. The old lady kneelled down to my black daughter, Aubrey, and said, “Aren’t you a weird-l looking little gorilla?”. Then she pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of Aubrey before I could react.

Aubrey grabbed my hand tighter as I stepped between them. “Excuse you, please delete that picture”. The lady started typing something and said, “You and your mulatto should have known better than to come around here. I’m posting her on Facebook”.

I screamed, “Do not post my daughter on Facebook. She’s only seven”. I reached for her phone, but she pulled it away.

Too late. “I’d get back in your car and drive right out of here before the gang comes”. She turned and shuffled away, typing on her screen.

I wanted to chase after her, but Aubrey tugged on my shirt. “Mommy, I’m scared”. “I don’t want to be here anymore”.

Her voice was so small. “Me neither”. “Let’s get out of here”.

I abandoned our cart and speedwalked toward the exit. We almost made it when the store janitor blocked our path. “Back to the zoo”.

His voice dripped with venom. “Back the f up and get back to mopping”. I pulled Aubrey behind me.

“You don’t know where you are, lady”. He stepped closer. “I clearly don’t know where I am”. “Why don’t you tell me why this store is so important?”.

I was shouting now. “You get the hell out now”. “I have to mop the floor because your filthy daughter walked all over it”. He pointed the mop handle at us.

I grabbed Aubrey’s hand and we ran to the parking lot before things got worse. That’s when I saw our car. Every window was smashed. Glass covered the seats and ground.

Aubrey started crying for real now as I tried to process what was happening. Another woman was getting into a white SUV holding a spray can. She caught my eye and smiled before speeding off.

As her car pulled away, I saw what she’d done. R A C E T R A I T O R. Spray painted across our hood in red letters.

“Quickly get in, baby”. “Careful of the glass”. I helped Aubrey into her booster seat.

I turned the key, but nothing happened. Tried again. The engine made a grinding sound, then started smoking.

Black smoke poured from under the hood as I kept turning the key desperately. We needed to leave now.

“Mommy, look out”. Aubrey screamed. Her door flew open. A man in a red cap reached in trying to grab her.

I lunged across the console, hitting his arms. He turned his attention to me. Came around to my side while I was twisted, protecting Aubrey.

My door opened. I saw the fist coming, but couldn’t dodge it. Trapped in the car, it connected with my jaw, and everything went sideways.

My vision blurred, ears ringing. I could taste blood. “Mommy, mommy, help me”. Aubrey’s terrified screams cut through the fog.

I tried to move, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Through blurry eyes, I saw multiple people surrounding our car.

The man in the red hat was pulling at Aubre’s seat belt. She was kicking and screaming, fighting with everything her little body had. More hands reached through the broken windows.

Someone grabbed my hair, yanking my head back. I swung wildly, but couldn’t connect. The red hat finally got Aubre’s buckle undone.

He started dragging her out while she clawed at the door frame. Her favorite bluey shirt ripped. One of her twinkle toes fell off in the struggle. “No, please”. I found my voice, but it was weak.

They pulled her from the car. There were multiple people just watching. The old lady from the store was there recording with her phone. The man with the mop. Other faces I didn’t recognize.

All of them watching as they carried my screaming daughter away. I tried to follow, but someone pushed me back down. My vision kept going dark.

The last thing I heard clearly was Aubrey’s voice getting farther away. Then hands were going through my pants. They started feeling me and took my phone and wallet.

Someone said something about teaching race traders a lesson. I forced myself to stay conscious, to remember faces, to fight through the pain because they had my daughter.

They had Aubrey, and I didn’t know what they planned to do with her. The sirens in the distance might have been real or might have been my desperate imagination. But the empty booster seat with her other shoe was definitely real.

They had taken my baby, and even though I was dying, I promised myself to save her her if it was the last thing I’d do.

The sirens got louder and louder until I knew they were real, and not just my desperate brain making things up. My ribs felt like broken glass when I tried to sit up.

But I grabbed Aubre’s fallen twinkle toes from the floor and held it so tight my knuckles went white. Blood kept filling my mouth and I had to spit it out the broken window to breathe.

Two EMTs ran over with their bags. And the woman immediately started checking my head while the man shined a light in my eyes.

I kept saying the same thing over and over that my daughter was kidnapped by a mob and they took her and we had to find her right now. The man grabbed his radio and called for police backup while the woman pressed gauze against my head and it came away soaked red.

They tried to put me on the stretcher, but I fought them because I couldn’t lie down when Aubrey needed me. The woman said I could sit up in the ambulance if I let them treat me, so I agreed and started telling them everything I could remember.

The man in the red cap had thick arms with a tattoo on his right wrist that looked like barbed wire. The old lady wore glasses on a chain and had gray hair in a bun.

The janitor had a name tag, but I couldn’t remember what it said. My words kept getting jumbled and I had to repeat things.

At the hospital, they wheeled me into a room where a police officer started asking questions, but my head was pounding so bad, I kept forgetting what he asked. He wanted exact descriptions and got frustrated when I couldn’t remember if the red cap had writing on it or not.

I started doubting myself and wondering if I was remembering anything right at all. A nurse came in holding her phone and showed me a video someone posted online of the attack, but it was edited weird.

It started with me reaching for the old lady’s phone and made it look like I attacked her first. The comments under it were horrible with people saying they hoped the mob taught us both a lesson and making threats about what they’d do to Aubrey if they found her.

My hands started shaking so bad I dropped the phone. That’s when Detective Zuri Chandler walked in wearing a dark suit and took the officer’s notebook from him.

She explained they were issuing an Amber Alert, even though kidnappings by strangers don’t always qualify, but hate crime abductions get special consideration.

For the first time since they took Aubrey, I felt a tiny spark of hope that someone was actually going to help. I suddenly remembered the woman with the spray can drove a white SUV and the cap on the paint can was blue, not black like I first thought.

Detective Chandler wrote everything down fast and said those details could help them track purchases at hardware stores. She told me she was heading to the grocery store to get their security footage, but warned me the manager already claimed their cameras weren’t working that day.

The way she said it, I could tell she didn’t believe him and had ways to check if he was lying. Nurse Elellanar Grimes came in with evidence bags and started putting my torn shirt and bloody jeans in them.

She took pictures of every single bruise and cut on my arms and face and ribs. While she worked, she whispered that she was making sure everything got documented right because she’d seen cases like this get buried when people didn’t want to deal with hate crimes.

My phone that I’d forgotten was in my back pocket suddenly buzzed with the emergency alert sound. The Amber Alert was going out across the whole state with Aubrey’s school picture and her description.

7 years old, black, 3′ 8″ in 60 lb. Last seen wearing a ripped bluey shirt and one pink Twinkle Toes shoe.

Seeing it written out like that made everything too real and my whole body started shaking because my baby was really gone and these people had her and I didn’t know what they were doing to her right now.

Two officers walked into my hospital room carrying paperwork and told me they’d towed my car to the impound lot for evidence processing. They handed me forms for insurance claims and said I’d need to contact my provider within 48 hours to start the process.

I stared at the papers trying to understand what they meant while my head throbbed and realized I had no way to get anywhere since my car was gone. My wallet was stolen during the attack, so I had no money for a taxi or even to buy food from the hospital cafeteria.

The officers left after giving me a case number, and I sat there holding useless papers with no phone to even call anyone for help.