Toronto police say they are investigating a robbery on the TTC after a video of a racially-charged interaction between two women on a subway train was posted online.
The passenger who shot the video, Margaret Anthony, told CTV News Toronto that the incident occurred on July 28 on a subway car near Eglinton West Station.
In the video, a woman in a black T-shirt is seen chasing another woman through an almost-empty subway car. As they get closer to the passenger filming the ordeal, it appears the two are fighting over a cellphone.
When the woman in the black shirt is told to “stop assaulting” the woman, she responds by saying she “just wants her to delete the video.”
The passenger filming the incident can be heard saying that the woman in the black shirt told the woman with the cellphone to “go back to China.”
The passenger then threatens to call police and the video ends when the subway car doors open and the two women run out on to the platform.
According to Anthony, the dispute started when the woman asked a man on the train for a cigarette. When she was denied, Anthony said the woman started hurling racial slurs at him before turning on the woman in scrubs, who had started filming the ordeal herself.
“When she started running away, I didn't realize she had taken that person's phone,” Anthony, who is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, said. “So she snatched her phone and refused to give it up because when she was yelling ‘go back to China,’ she thought she was being filmed by the nurse in scrubs. That’s why she stole her phone to begin with.”
Disturbed by what she saw, Anthony said she decided to start filming as well.
“I'm Half Chinese, I’m born in this city, I'm Canadian and my blood was boiling,” she said. “I did what I thought was right and pressed the emergency alarm and hopefully the police could come in and stand through and ensure that this gets dealt with.”\
According to a Facebook post by the victim’s relative, her aunt’s eyesight is poor so she was holding her phone up to her face.
“The girl assumed that Aunt was taking a video of them,” the Facebook post reads. “She started harassing Aunt, telling her to go back to China. That this isn’t her county and she’s a Canadian citizen, then took Aunt’s phone. She never got her phone back.”
The TTC says they have turned the surveillance video over to Toronto police, who are now investigating the incident as a robbery.
“The TTC is a safe place for everybody,” TTC spokesperson Stuart Green told CTV News Toronto on Tuesday. “It should be free of any kind of harassment and certainly racist language is not something we would tolerate.”
Toronto police told CP24 that officers at 13 Division are investigating the incident as a robbery.
