A man says he and his family were harassed on a recent trip back home to the Boston area for being of Indian descent.
Pervez Taufiq recorded video of the incident, in which a woman can be seen saying, "Your family is from India, you have no respect, you have no rules, you think you can push everyone, push push push."
Taufiq and his family were in Los Angeles, en route from a vacation in Cancun, Mexico, back home to Dracut, Massachusetts. When the woman began to lash out, telling his kids to shut up," Taufiq recalled, "I lost it and said, 'You don't have a right to talk to my kids like that.'"
The woman started using Indian stereotypes, and she can also be seen showing him her middle fingers — Taufiq, a wedding photographer, said he was surprised she didn't tone down the rhetoric when he started recording.
At one point in the video, after saying she's from America, Taufiq tells the woman he was born in America, which she denies.
After NBC10 Boston reached out to a woman believed to be the one seen in the video for her side of the story by phone, text and social media, a woman claiming to be her called late Tuesday to say she suffers from a traumatic brain injury and that she was out of line for what she said.
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Taufiq said it wasn't just the woman's words that hurt: "What really stung in that moment, while all of that was happening, there was pin-drop silence. Nobody said a word to back us up, nobody said, 'Hey, you can't say that.'"
Taufiq's video shows United Airlines staffers eventually intervening, as well as another passenger telling them her behavior made him and his family uncomfortable. The incident appeared to play out on a bus on the Tarmac at the airport.
Asked about the incident Tuesday, United said in a statement, "We don't have anything to share on this."
