Woman charged after pulling gun on Black family in a parking lot says she feared for her life
THE “Karen” who pulled a gun on a Black mother and daughter in a Chipotle parking lot last week claims she did it because she feared for her life.
Jillian Wuestenberg and her husband, Eric Wuestenberg, were charged with felony assault after the incident in Orion Township, Michigan, on July 1.
The couple was exiting Chipotle that night when Takeila Hill claimed Jillian bumped into her 15-year-old daughter as they walked into the restaurant.
Daughter Makayla Green told The Detroit News: “Before I could walk into Chipotle, this woman was coming out, and I had moved out the way so she can walk out.”
“She bumped me, and I said, ‘Excuse you.’ And then she started cussing me out and saying things like I was invading her personal space.”
Makayla said she was nervous about the situation in the parking lot, so she called her mom over.
“I walked up on the woman yelling at my daughter,” Hill told the news outlet. “She couldn’t see me because her back was to me, but she was in my daughter’s face.”
Video from the scene that’s been posted online shows the encounter after the “Karen” allegedly bumped into the teenager.
The 15-year-old calls Jillian ignorant and says she bumped into her, as the woman says the teen and her mom are blocking her from getting to her car.
Jillian’s husband, Eric, who was at the Chipotle with her appears and asks the Black women: “Who the f**k do you think you guys are?”
The two sides argue, with the Black women calling the white couple racist.
Hill asks why the woman didn’t apologize for bumping into her daughter.
The woman tells her: “You cannot just walk around calling white people racist … White people aren’t racist … I care about you and I’m sorry if you had an incident that has made someone make you feel like that. No one is racist.”
The video cuts away as the couple appears to try to drive off, and Makayla shouts for her mom to “watch,” but when the clip cuts back, Hill can be heard questioning if the car hit her.
Hill told the News she thought the white couple’s car was going to hit them as they backed up out of the parking space, so she hit the back of their vehicle to stop it.
That’s when the white woman appears on video holding a gun as she shouts, “Get the f**k away from me.”
Eventually, Jillian and Eric drove off to another area to wait for police to arrive, and were charged by the Oakland County Prosecutor the following day with felony assault.
Jillian told WXYZ in an interview on Thursday that the video from last week is “hard to watch.”
“It’s scary. The more I see it the more I realize I’m more afraid of that situation now than I was then,” she said.
“Within moments, a second or two, I had multiple people within two feet of me and I just remember thinking, ‘I am not going home tonight.’”
Jillian said she “grew up around lots of handguns” that were “just everyday part of life. It was just something that was there.”
The interviewer told her: “You’re seen chambering the bullet. That means business.”
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To which Jillian replied: “That meant I am about to die and I don’t want to die.”
Hill’s attorney, Christopher Quinn, told the news station they were pleased with the charges, and said the Hill family didn’t block the Wuestenbergs’ from getting into their car.
“Karens” is a slang term for middle-aged white women who have gone viral online for being racist or showing entitlement and speaking down to people of color.