From Charlotte Observer
A Charlotte Muslim mom said she feared for her life when a man pulled up to her car as she breastfed her baby at a northeast Charlotte shopping center this week, glared menacingly at her for several minutes and pulled out a long gun with the barrel pointed directly at her.
“Now I should get out of here,” the woman recalled thinking. She clutched her baby and walked as fast as she could through the parking lot to an Indian store beside a Big Lots for help. The man in the newer-model red pickup sped off.
The woman recounted the terrifying episode in an interview with the Observer on Wednesday evening, after the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group called on police to investigate the case as a possible hate crime.
The woman said she is a native of Pakistan who has lived in Charlotte for 11 years. She’d never encountered anything like what happened to her on Tuesday in the shopping center parking lot off University City Boulevard. She is in her early 30s, married with four children, she said.
She’d stopped at the shopping center for groceries at about 12:30 p.m., on the way home from a doctor’s visit with her son, who was born premature on Feb. 9.
She said the driver is a white man in his 40s or 50s, and bald. He wore a cap or hat. The driver never spoke to her as he glared at her before getting out of the pick up and getting the rifle from beneath the back seat, she said.
That’s when she decided to bolt.
“I’m not going to sit here and let him shoot me,” she remembers thinking. “I took my baby in my arms and rushed toward the store.”
