Donisha Prendergast, the Granddaughter of the late Bob Marley, is filing suit against a California police department after a white neighbor mistook her and her guests for burglars as they exited all because they didn’t wave.
ABC 7 News Reports that Prendergast and two companions were loading their suitcases in the car outside of a home they rented via Airbnb in Rialto, CA. A white neighbor called the police telling them she saw “three black people stealing stuff.” Prendergast documented the incident and posted the video on her Facebook account.
The neighbor alleges she waves at the group but when they didn’t wave back that made her suspicious. The owner of the Airbnb is siding with her neighbor saying the incident could have been avoided if Prendergast and her companions weren’t “rude” and waved back.
“If the kids had simply smiled at (my neighbor) and waved back and acknowledged her and said, ‘We’re just Airbnb guests checking out,’ none of this would have ever happened,” she said. “But instead, they were rude, unkind, not polite.”
The Rialto police department maintains that the incident wasn’t racially motivated.
To see the initial incident where Donisha Prendergast and her companions were initially stopped, and the full news report, flip the pages.