Umar Farooq
20 February 2019•Update: 21 February 2019
By Umar Farooq
WASHINGTON
A video of a white woman berating the manager of a Mexican restaurant in West Virginia for not speaking English is viral Wednesday after being posted online.
Irma Dleon posted the footage on her Facebook page, showing a woman yelling at the restaurant manager for speaking in Spanish with his employees.
"Get the [expletive] out of my country," the woman identified as Jill, told Sergio Budar, the general manager of the Tampico Mexican Restaurant in Parkersburg. "English is our first language so you need to speak English," she said.
Another employee came to the Budar’s defense, calling the woman a racist, and asked her to leave.
"I don’t have any problem with the way you look," she repeated multiple times, trying to defend herself. "When you are in America you need to speak English."
Budar had offered to pay for the woman and her party's meal if they left the restaurant, to which the party agreed.
While she was leaving, however, Jill threw a napkin at the owner and said, "I got raped by illegal aliens who didn't speak English" and then proceeded to call Budar a "[expletive] rapist."
The video was first uploaded Saturday, and since then has been viewed more than 1 million times. Dleon said in the Facebook post it was her daughter who took the video.
"My poor baby was frightened but cannot believe this continues to happen. We should be united as a country but there is much hate," Dleon said.
Budar, who is originally from Mexico, later told NBC News the incident had left him angry and sad.
"It's unbelievable that we're still seeing this kind of behavior to this day," Budar said. "I've been living here for almost two decades, and counting. I got my U.S. citizenship while here, but that doesn't mean that people can't speak other languages that are not English."
