Californian police arrested a 40-year-old man named Jordan Douglas Krah after he was allegedly filmed on Christmas Eve directing racist and homophobic comments toward Asian-American diners who were eating at an In-N-Out Burger fast-food restaurant.
“You guys filming yourself eating?” The man believed to be Krah told the diners, Arine Kim and Elliot Ha, in the video. “You’re weird homosexuals.”
While the diners express disbelief at his comments, the man later returns to ask if the diners are Japanese or Korean. When Ha answers “Korean,” the man accuses the Ha of being “Kim Jung Un’s boyfriend,” referring to the Supreme Leader of North Korea, and asks whether the two have “had gay sex before.”
Ha humorously responds, “I wouldn’t go that far. We’re only on second base. He hasn’t taken me out to dinner yet.”
When Ha then comments about taking the stranger out, Kim asks him to stop. The stranger then says he could spit in Ha’s face.
The man later says, “I’m a slave master, you f*cking f*g,” and later adds, “See you outside in a minute… See you outside and what I can do to him,” meaning Ha.
In the video, Ha and Kim look startled at the seeming threat. Kim later said that the strange man then stood outside of the restaurant, staring at them through the window for nearly 10 minutes afterward.
@arinekim My friend and i were filming his reaction to my in-n-out order when this happened… #arinekim ♬ original sound – arine kim
The video of their interaction has been viewed over 13.8 million times on the video-sharing platform TikTok as of Tuesday, December 27. The video went viral and was shared on Twitter where it helped police identify and arrest the suspect.
In a follow-up video, Kim noted that the man had been arrested and that she and Ha are pressing hate crime charges against him for his insults and threats.
She noted that he was also charged by police in Danville, California for another incident involving him allegedly spitting and making racist remarks towards a Filipino family.
Kim said she didn’t expect anyone to take the incident very seriously because she grew up in a predominantly white community where she regularly experienced racist comments about Kim Jon Un and dog eating. She also said that, while she recorded her incident, tens of thousands of other people of color around the U.S. aren’t able to document or widely share their own experiences of racism and hostility from others.
Krah has been booked at the County Jail in Martinez, California.