Sara Micheal is speaking out about her experience with King’s District RCMP and Wolfville Mayor Wendy Donovan following an incident that left her with visible injuries and during which she said she was verbally attacked with racial remarks.
In an interview with the Halifax Examiner, Micheal, who is a来自厄立特里亚的永久居民，said she moved out of an apartment where she experienced a lot of racism from the landlord, and into a house with more than half a dozen other roommates she didn’t know.
Micheal said she didn’t expect a college town to be quiet all of the time, especially on weekends, but in the early hours of Saturday, January 8, one roommate, a woman, was making noise by stomping around in the hallway and talking loudly.
“So, I asked her, ‘Can you please keep it down a bit?’” Micheal recalled. “And she reacted by initially telling me she didn’t really care if it was two or five AM. And then she started to walk towards me. I wasn’t really sure what she was trying to do to be honest because I had just woke up at that point.”
“她最终走向我，直到她就像鼻子对鼻子一样，面对面，她开始（身体）检查我。因此，在那之后，我最终像将她从我身上推开一样，因为我要求她摆脱脸，而她不会。那时，我什至不知道她在说什么。”
“她的脸是非常接近我的。她是not willing to get off of me, so I pushed her off of me. And then that’s when it escalated because she tried to grab me by the neck, and that’s how I ended up with scratch marks on my neck.”
萨拉·米歇尔（Sara Micheal）说，在一场种族主义攻击使她陷入困境之后，花了两个星期的时间向加拿大皇家骑警发表声明。照片：Sara Micheal。
Micheal said she had to punch the roommate a few times to get her off her person. She said that’s when the incident escalated to racial remarks.
那时，另一个与该女子朋友的室友干预了。
“She got in between us,” Micheal said. “At first it seemed like she was trying to break up the fight, but then she tried to justify what her friend tried to do, saying things like ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have pushed her,’ and she kept framing it as a fight even though this girl tried to assault me.”
她说，室友随后试图淡化种族言论，说她和三名黑人在一起。
米歇尔（Micheal）那天晚些时候搬出了
与加拿大皇家骑警会面
Micheal said she had reason to believe that her attacker called the police and lied about what happened. She feared that it could impact her permanent residency status and Canadian citizenship application.
第二天,伴随着一个朋友——另一个房颤rican woman — Micheal went to the King’s District RCMP station to tell her side of the story and file a report for the assault. She said what happened next left her even more devastated.
“We went to the police station in Wolfville, the officer opened the door, he immediately dismissed us, [and] said that I was just ‘playing victim,'” Micheal said. “He was just talking to us like us being African means that we don’t understand laws.”
Micheal said the officer was dismissive, kept cutting them off as they spoke, and talked down to them.
“When I commented that I was sick of this town he replied with, ‘You’re welcome to leave if you don’t like how we do things here.’”
RCMP站，沃尔夫维尔，NS B4P 1C4 363 Main St。照片：Google地图
“I personally didn’t go [to the police] immediately because I didn’t think the police were going to help out. They watched a confederate flag fly in front of a Tim Hortons on Main [Street] for months before they finally did something about it,” she said.
Since moving to Wolfville, Micheal said she’s witnessed and experienced racism at Acadia University, in the workplace, at parties where white students would randomly shout out the n-word,她的工作外事件，一个年长的白人跟随一名年轻的黑人女孩，使女孩流泪，移民特工，以前的房东，以及在这种情况下，涉及繁忙的蒂姆·霍顿（Tim Hortons）之外的同盟旗。
Micheal said after it felt like she was getting nowhere in trying to file her complaint, she said she turned to her friend and said, “This town is very racist.”
“我很累。因为那个家伙没有让我介绍这个故事的一面，所以他一直在切断我，他一直说“你只是在扮演受害者”。”
That’s when she said things got even worse and the officer, in uniform, became verbally aggressive, ordering her to “Take it back! Take it back!”
“我们最终离开了。我的朋友感到越来越不舒服。我觉得大部分时间很生气，但我也开始觉得他正试图从我身上引起反应，以便他有借口去身体或逮捕我。”她说。
Micheal said she tried to get the officer’s name, but he was yelling at them.
“Even as we were already walking away he was just yelling it out ‘Take it back! Take it back!’”
“他有小胡子，眼镜，……有点笨拙，棕色的头发，那里也有几头发。…我会在较短的一面说。”
Texting with the mayor
Following the incident at the police station, Micheal said she left several phone messages with the RCMP but never got a response. She said she then decided to contact the media.
After that, Micheal reached out to温迪·多诺万（Wendy Donovan）, the mayor of Wolfville, who responded in a group text with the town’s CAO, Erin Beaudin.
Micheal said she was doubtful the police officer she spoke to had passed any of her information along to the officer investigating the incident with the roommate, and she was also upset by the interaction she had at the police station.
In the texts, Donovan advised Micheal that Beaudin had passed her concerns off to an RCMP officer and gave her an e-mail address to contact.
尽管博德没有用书面形式记录她的主张，而是建议米歇尔（Micheal）致电车站通过电话进行口头传达。
“让我们张贴！”她说。
Micheal called the number and then told Donovan and Beaudin that she was now waiting for a call back. In the meantime, she told them she would be doing an interview with media.
她的文字写道：“我不仅要在这里讨论我的经历，还要讨论朋友和熟人的一般经历。”
She said that’s when the situation turned odd. In an attempt to have Micheal reconsider her plans, Donovan suggested that the uniformed RCMP officer she was speaking to at the police station may not have, in fact, been a real police officer in the first place.
“Let’s say the person you were speaking to was not a real officer, just say, and you are smearing an innocent organization,” Donovan’s text read.
“I’m absolutely going to bring up the officer, he answered the door. He had a uniform,” Micheal’s text said.
Wolfville Mayor, Wendy Donovan. Photo: wendydonovanwolfvillecouncil.com
“我什至都不认为她会[说]这么愚蠢的话，”米歇尔对审查员说。“就像我和我的朋友一样，即使他只是打开了警察局的门，并一直称'我们'为警察局，他也无法说出该怎么样。”
“我不知道这如何影响我的状态”
多诺万没有回应审查员对米歇尔的指控发表评论的要求。发言人说，加拿大皇家骑警无法讨论正在进行的调查。
米歇尔说，周一，她终于能够在1月8日与室友发表有关此事件的声明。
“这一定是我第六或第七次尝试见面的尝试。当然，我拒绝去车站，因为在军官向我们大喊大叫之后，我根本不感到安全。”
Micheal said that an RCMP officer named Jason Morin is assigned to the case involving the physical altercation between Micheal and her former roommate. She said she was told the last name of the officer she met with at the police station is Munroe. As of now, she said there’s only one open investigation.
“I put in a complaint about officer Munroe… and I haven’t heard anything back,” she said.
Micheal said she’s now dealing with the additional stress of trying to find a lawyer.
“It’s been really hard to find someone that could help because every time I called for legal help their response was, ‘We can’t help you until you get charged with something.’ But I don’t want to get charged with anything to begin with,” she said.
“I’m a permanent resident, I just applied for my citizenship. I don’t know how this is going affect my status.”
在采访中，米歇尔回忆起2019 Black Lives Matter protestin the town that she said was mere “performative acts of solidarity.”
她说：“这就是为什么我要伸出援手，因为这甚至不仅仅是这个女孩试图攻击我，因为这不是我第一次必须经历种族主义的事情，而是关于小镇的反应方式。”“因为这里的有色学生多年来一直在抱怨。”
“我认为我只是厌倦了整个……我的捍卫自己会让我成为侵略者。我厌倦了这个想法，即在有人试图殴打我时必须保持这种勇敢的镇定。”
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