Oh, Wallace.
All you had to do was not be an asshole and yet that proved to be a task so big that you couldn’t stop yourself from parking your white pickup truck (because of course you drive a pickup truck) and interrupting a Black man who was trying to do his job. And now the police want to have a word with you.
On Tuesday, Mississippi police found out that the Ohio man (Wallace) who just couldn’t allow NBC News’ Shaquille Brewster–a Black man with microphone and a cameraman–to do his work in peace, was Benjamin Eugene Dagley (who we affectionately call Wallace) and they’ve charged him “with two counts of simple assault and one count of disturbing the peace and one count of violating an emergency curfew,” NBC News reports.
And get this: Old Wallace was already on probation in Ohio and could have violated the terms of his release with Cuyahoga County, Ohio if he traveled without authorization, police said, NBC News reports.
Apparently Wallace doesn’t just have a problem with Black men or Black men holding microphones; he also has a problem with not writing on shit, as documents show that the 54-year-old pleaded guilty to vandalism, inducing panic and attempted assault. And he was arrested in 2017 for “suspicion of drilling holes into tanks of dangerous chemicals” because that’s totally normal.
According to police, Wallace’s “drilling holes into the tanks of sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, yellow chromate, ferrous chloride, and sulfuric acid risked a potential environmental disaster,” WLBT reports.
Turns out that Wallace once owned Cleveland Plating, the place where he was caught drilling holes, and employees at the company told police that Wallace knew exactly what he was doing when he released the toxic chemicals. A security guard was taken to the hospital suffering from symptoms of cyanide poisoning.
Two months after this incident, Wallace was “charged with misdemeanor assault after he once again broke into Cleveland Plating with two other accomplices.”
Wallace allegedly yelled at a security guard, slammed a door into their knee and then punched them in the mouth, WLBT reports.
NBC News notes that it was unclear why Wallace was some 1,000 miles away from his home in Wooster, Ohio, during a major storm yelling at a newscaster while on probation.
Brewster, who has spent the majority of his life minding his business and drinking the recommended amount of water each day, was doing a “live MSNBC shot from Gulfport, reporting on Tropical Storm Ida in coastal Mississippi, when a man pulled up in a white pickup truck and sprinted toward him.”
Wallace ran down on Brewster and the feed cut back to the newsroom right before the footage that would’ve shown Brewster releasing the spirit of the ancestors on Wallace’s ass.
Fine, I don’t know if Brewster unleashed a full can of whoop-ass on Wallace but a man can dream, can’t he?