By Earl Rinehart, The Columbus Dispatch, staff and wire reports
COLUMBUS – Brittany Daughenbaugh couldn’t sleep, so the Capital University student decided to go on a Pokémon Go hunt in the wee hours of Thursday. She had seen the men across Francis Street, but paid them no attention. She was on the trail of a good character.
“All of a sudden they’re behind me,” Daughenbaugh said, one man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and the other a “Trump-Spence” sweatshirt.
The sweatshirt man grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t worry honey, President Trump says this is okay.” He then punched her in the face and the arm. She fell, hit her head on the pavement and blacked out.
Bexley police were investigating the attack on Daughenbaugh, a white woman, by the two young white men. It was among increasing reports of threats against women and Muslims nationwide, and in central Ohio.
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They include a Muslim motorist, who was wearing a hajib head scarf, who told Columbus police that a white trucker accosted her Friday in stopped traffic on Sawmill Road, cursing her and her children and telling them to “go back to my country,” and an Ohio State University student was said she was threatened recently for wearing a hajib.
Police say an OSU student shoved a man down a flight of stairs during an anti-Donald Trump rally on campus (video above).
University police say they arrested Shane Stanton, 24, on Monday and charged him with a misdemeanor count of assault after he threw himself into protester Timothy Adams and sent the man hurtling down the steps. Adams was giving a speech from a staircase landing in the student union building when the incident occurred shortly before 6:00 p.m. He wasn’t seriously injured in the attack.
Court records don’t list an attorney for Stanton.
University president Michael Drake tells the school’s student newspaper, The Lantern, that OSU protects First Amendment rights actively but does not tolerate intimidation or threats to students, faculty or campus visitors.
Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther issued a similar statement Monday.
“Columbus is committed to being an open, safe and inclusive community,” said Mayor Ginther. “We support First Amendment rights, but we cannot tolerate threats and intimidation. Verbal and physical attacks do not represent who we are. I encourage people to respect one another – those we agree with, as well as those we don’t. Let’s concentrate on what unites us.” -Mayor Andrew Ginther
Reports elsewhere in the country were equally disturbing. Ann Arbor, Mich., police said a woman was forced to remove her hijab after a man threatened to set her on fire near the University of Michigan campus. A teacher in Gwinnett County outside Atlanta was told to hang herself with her hajib.
Whether the increase of race or gender attacks in Columbus and nationwide can be tied to Trump’s election is up for debate.
What is clear to Romin Iabal is Trump’s victory has “produced or empowered a group of racists or Islamophobics who will always look at Muslims as others,” said the staff attorney for the Columbus office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.