The husband of a Arizona woman caught on video grabbing a convenience store customer and telling her to “go back to your country” says the encounter was out of character for his wife, and he has apologized for her racist insults.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Robert Harrian told The Arizona Republic. “What she said was reprehensible … I’m very, very sorry.”
The video, first posted on Facebook by Greg Conn, who was in the Phoenix store, has 20,000 shares, 12,000 reactions and nearly 9,000 comments. It shows Tamara Harrian approaching a customer checking out at the cash register, identified in the post as Karina Rodriguez. The gas station/convenience store was a Shell in north Phoenix, according to the Facebook post.
Tamara tells Rodriguez that she isn’t welcome in the store and needs to “go back to your country” along with other, similar remarks. As an exchange between the women escalates, Harrian can be seen grabbing Rodriguez’s arm. Rodriguez then slaps her across the face.
Robert Harrian said he first saw the video when a friend emailed it to him Sunday morning. He says he and his wife aren’t racist and that a mental illness can make her act out of character.
“I’ve been brought to tears a lot the past couple days,” he said. “I have tried to do my best to share with people what really happened, but the emails don’t stop, the posts don’t stop.”
Robert Harrian owns the Harrian law firm in downtown Glendale, which he says received more than 1,000 negative reviews posted online since the video went viral.
“Yesterday the phone lines were so busy, I couldn’t get a call in or out,” Harrian said. “So many emails came into me that it crashed our email. When I opened it up this morning, I had 300 emails.”
He worries his name will be tied to racism and that he’ll lose work. He isn’t sure his law firm, which employs less than 10 people, will survive.
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