A crowd last week at a Dallas airport helped take down a man who started hurling insults and then physically attacking a stranger he thought was gay — and the whole thing was captured on video.
The video was posted online on Thursday, the day the incident reportedly took place.
It showed man standing by a gate at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and heckling the stranger, who appeared to be filming the confrontation on a phone.
A man in a cowboy hat soon appeared on the scene to mediate the dispute.
“What are you upset about?” the man in the hat asked.
“Queers!” the man answered, pointing to the person he had been heckling. “This faggot, right here.”
Before hurling a few more slurs, the angry man appeared to kick and then punch the stranger.
At that point, no less than four people, including the man in the cowboy hat, rushed to peel the man off of his victim, the video showed. The crowd then rushed across the floor and tackled the attacker to the ground.
“No way, motherfucker. You ain’t doin’ that shit, motherfucker,” the man in the cowboy hat could be heard saying once the man had been taken down.
Two police officers soon appeared and cuffed the assailant. He continued to offer his thoughts on the incident while the officers arrested him.
“Want me to tell you the reason why I did it? Because this is America,” he said. “That’s why.”
“The same reason why you get to live and breathe while black,” he said to the two police officers, who were black.
One odd note: In the days since the video was posted, some pointed out that one of the men who jumped into the fray bears a striking resemblance to actor Paul Rudd.
Wonkette even found tweets from someone who said Rudd was an on airplane connecting out of Dallas.
However, Rudd’s publicist Jodi Gottlieb, in an email to TPM on Monday, denied the actor was there.
“It is not him,” she wrote. “Thanks for checking.”
Watch the video below:
This post has been updated.
