Austin Man Who Drenched Woman With Sprinkler Says Dispute Was About BLM Flag
A man in Austin, Texas, said that a viral tussle on October 7 involving a lawn sprinkler was started over a Black Lives Matter flag.
The man in the video with a sprinkler, Ian Doherty, posted the footage to his Facebook page with a caption explaining his side of the story.
“My neighbor has a Black Lives Matter sign in her front yard. Some lady parks in the middle of the street and starts screaming ‘White Lives Matter!’” he wrote. “For 30 minutes. After politely asking her to move along, I put the hose on her.”
The video shows a man holding a sprinkler while a woman in black clothing walks up to him. They are seen exchanging words before he points the water at her. The woman attempts to take the hose away multiple times but slips. The people behind the camera can be heard asking if they want them to call 9-1-1.
According to local news station KXAN-TV, police were called to the scene but no charges were filed.
In an interview with KXAN, Doherty said he has no time for the woman he calls a “bully,” and said he was "glad I did what I did.”
According to Doherty’s statements to KXAN, the woman yelled about other things in the neighbor’s yard, but the BLM flag being more visible than the American flag was what sparked her outrage.
In another video of the incident posted by KXAN, after she is hosed down, the woman then slowly walks back to her car. The neighbor who she was initially yelling at then says to her, “If you had approached me with kindness and said, ‘Oh hey, by the way, your flags are up wrong,’ I would have responded better.”
KXAN said they reached out to the woman in the video, but said she did not want to comment on the record. Her lawyer sent KXAN a letter Thursday saying “the online article is filled with half-truths and flat out deceptive statements,” but did not elaborate.
“The neighbors have all made peace with one another and there is nothing to be gained by stirring things up again,” the lawyer wrote to KXAN. Credit: Anonymous via Storyful
