A Georgia man was taken into police custody after authorities say he followed a high school teacher into a shopping center parking lot and yelled racial slurs at him during a road rage incident.
“It’s shocking that it was so blatant,” Terrence Stover, a U.S. history teacher and football coach at South Gwinnett High School, told WSB-TV. “It’s wrong and it’s hurtful.”
Stover told the station that his issue with the man, identified by authorities as 49-year-old Eric DeKeyzer, began around 10 a.m. April 6. Stover said that DeKeyzer was driving too closely to him, so he made room so that DeKeyzer could move around him. However, at a stoplight, Stover said, DeKeyzer instead pulled up and began to hurl the slurs at him.
“He rolls his window down and he starts saying a lot of racial slurs and shooting me birds, middle finger and stuff like that,” the teacher said.
That’s when Stover decided to pull into a shopping center parking lot to avoid confrontation and get away from the raging lunatic, to no avail. DeKeyzer had followed him and Stover started recording.
“You called me a nigger for no reason,” Stover can be heard telling DeKeyzer in the video.
“Yeah, because I knew it would get a fucking rise out of you because you’re acting like one,” DeKeyzer taunts Stover in response.
Stover says he often warns his students about having self-control, which he says helped him to remain calm and record the situation instead of getting involved in a fight that could have ended with him in handcuffs.
“I teach my kids not to fight unless you’re defending yourself,” he said. “I just pray people think before they do.”
Stover and other witnesses at the shopping center called local police, and an officer reviewed the video footage and took DeKeyzer away. DeKeyzer was charged with disorderly conduct. Officers also found a pocketknife on him.
“There was a weapon. He was trying to, as he said, get a rise out of me,” Stover noted.