Riverside County woman calls 911 on family at Costco, then police investigate and arrest her instead

A Southern California woman has been arrested after her social media posts about a child she saw at Costco led to “criminal accusations and racial bias” against the girl’s parents, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said.

The 23-year-old woman from Desert Hot Springs faces charges of providing false information to a police officer and knowingly filing a false police report.

The woman had posted a video of a family eating at a Costco in Palm Desert on Aug. 20. There were five children; one of them, a teenage girl, is Black. The woman said the teen had seemed sad, so she approached her and repeatedly asked if she was OK. When the family left the food court, the woman taking the video followed them to the parking lot and then called 911.

In her social media posts, she claimed the girl had “begged for help” and said her parents raped and otherwise abused her.

The posts were widely shared by social media users who identified the girl and her parents by name and publicized their home address. They urged people to call the father’s workplace — a dental office — and to put pressure on child welfare officials to “save” the teen.

Much of the animosity toward the parents centered on the fact that the family is biracial: The couple and the other children are White, and the girl in question is Black.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department coordinated with the police in Gilbert, Ariz., where the family lives, and said it was satisfied that no abuse was occurring — that they were “by all accounts a happy and healthy family.” Arizona’s child protection agency also investigated.

In announcing the arrest Saturday of the woman who took the video, the sheriff’s department alleged she fabricated the allegations and that her “reckless actions … caused this family to suffer through death threats, closure of the father’s business, and unnecessary stress and drama to the child.”

In addition, the “significant public outrage” over the allegations caused a flood of phone calls to the sheriff’s dispatch center, “taking up valuable call time,” the department said.

Correction: This article initially said the arrested woman is 21, as reported by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. It was revised to agree with the jail’s booking record, which gives her age as 23.

Source: Orange County Register