Video During the week of April 28, 2025, a video was recorded at Soldiers Field Memorial Park in
Rochester, Minnesota, by a 30-year-old man named Sharmake Omar. The video showed a white woman being confronted by Omar after calling an eight-year-old boy of
Somali descent a "
nigger". Omar did not know the boy but had met his parents. When Omar, who is also of Somali heritage, asked the woman if she had called the child the slur, she responded "Yeah," adding that the child had taken items belonging to her child from a
diaper bag. Omar then confronted Hendrix, asking if he had heard her correctly. Hendrix answered yes, then directed the epithet at him several times, at which point Omar began filming her. The video, which runs for 49 seconds, shows Hendrix walking away from Omar while carrying her son, with Omar following behind asking her to explain her actions. Hendrix responded, "mind your fucking own business" and accused the boy of stealing items from her son's diaper bag. When Omar asked if that would justify her use of the slur, Hendrix responded, "If that's what he's going to act like." The video then shows Hendrix giving Omar the
middle finger, and sticking her tongue out at him. At one point, Omar asked Hendrix, "Why don't you have the balls to say it right now again so that the world can see?" Hendrix responded by repeating the slur three times in rapid succession, which Omar told her was "hate speech". "I don't give a shit," replied Hendrix, after which Omar said, "We'll see about that, what the Internet has to say about you." In his interview with NBC, Omar said that Hendrix described the boy as a drain on the
welfare system, and that the boy had been "visibly upset by the incident." In a different interview with
KIMT-TV, Omar said he did not believe the woman's accusations of the child stealing from the diaper bag. According to the Rochester local newspaper,
Post-Bulletin, Omar said the boy had taken a packet of applesauce off a park bench, which can be seen being held by Hendrix in the video.
Aftermath Soon after the video went viral, Hendrix publicly declared herself to be the woman in the video and set up a fundraiser on the
crowdfunding website
GiveSendGo in order to raise money to "help protect" her family. On her campaign page, Hendrix wrote that her family's address and her
Social Security number had been leaked in the aftermath of the video, and she said that she had received online threats and needed to relocate her family for safety reasons. Hendrix defended her actions by writing, "I called the kid out for what he was." By May 6, the fundraiser had raised over . Many of the donations were accompanied by comments expressing
alt-right and
racist sympathies, including references to
Holocaust denial and
white nationalism. Some donors wrote that they were defending
free speech. In response, GiveSendGo decided to mute comments on the fundraiser. Some conservatives said they saw the campaign for Hendrix as a "form of backlash" to the funds raised for the accused in the
killing of Austin Metcalf, in which a black student had been charged with murdering a white student in
Frisco, Texas, the month prior; the accused's fundraiser, also on GiveSendGo, raised more than half a million dollars. Some supporters of
Make America Great Again also viewed it as a protest against
anti-white racism and
cancel culture. The parents of the boy requested privacy, and said that they wanted Hendrix to be prosecuted if possible. ==Reactions==