According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, a mob of black youths stopped the woman's car and dragged her into the street, beating her until other neighborhood residents rescued her. She was not the only one. In multiple scenes reminiscent of the brutal attack on white truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, black Cincinnati rioters beat and bloodied white motorists. The assailants hurled cement bricks at their victims as they drove by, and used baseball bats and bottles to damage their cars. The ongoing violence originally stemmed from anger over a recent police shooting of an unarmed black man.
Every needless death is a tragedy.
But instead of waiting for an investigation to establish the facts, hundreds of residents used the incident as an excuse to wage a full-scale race riot. The mother of the police shooting victim pleaded for peace. It turned from a police issue to a black-white issue. As is typical of cowering politicians more worried about public relations than public safety, Cincinnati's public officials failed to quell the race-based violence immediately. Jewish residents of the Crown Heights neighborhood of New York City remember it well.