Photo: @keyonharrold/Instagram
On Saturday, Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold and his 14-year-old son were on their way to brunch at the Arlo, a boutique hotel in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, when they were intercepted by an agitated woman in the lobby. The confrontation, which Harrold recorded on his phone, was ugly: In the video, the unidentified woman accosts Harrold and Keyon Harrold Jr., who are both Black, accusing the latter of stealing her iPhone. She then furiously demands the hotel manager to help her — and to Harrold’s further disbelief, the manager complies, asking Harrold Jr. to hand over his phone. The video cuts out as Harrold and his son attempt to leave the scene, after which she allegedly tackled the son. She also, the hotel later informed Harrold, found her phone soon after the confrontation.
Since Harrold shared the footage, it has gone viral across social media platforms, drawing comparisons to the notorious confrontation between Amy Cooper and a black birder in Central Park this past summer. The video has also sparked two separate investigations: one by the New York Police Department, and another by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Here’s what we know so far.
A woman accosted jazz musician Keyon Harrold and his son at a boutique hotel in Manhattan, falsely accusing the teenager of stealing her phone.
By the time Harrold started recording his encounter with the woman at the Arlo, where he had been staying as a guest since mid-December, the situation was already tense. In the video, the woman screeches at Harrold Jr., “take the case off, that’s mine,” before demanding the hotel manager to “literally get it back.” When the manager then asks Harrold Jr. if he can see the phone, Harrold is stunned. “Are you kidding me?” he asks of the woman and manager both. “You think there’s only one iPhone made in the world?” The video ends as he and his son are moving toward the elevator for reprieve, which proved unsuccessful. Harrold says the woman then tackled his son and attempted to dig her hands in his pockets, which the family is calling assault. “She scratched me; she tackled and grabbed him. He is a child!!!” Harrold wrote on Instagram. He’s just grateful he was there to protect his son: “I’ve seen people be hurt or even killed for less,” he told the New York Times.
Harrold says the hotel later told him that the woman had been a guest at the hotel earlier in the week, and that soon after the incident, she found her phone: Apparently, it was in the lobby the whole time, where an Uber driver had dropped it off after she left it in their car. Harrold says that the woman has not apologized to he or his son.
The hotel has faced intense criticism for mishandling the incident.
As the video quickly went viral across social media — as of Monday evening, it has been viewed nearly 2 million times on Instagram alone — the incident was widely decried as another blatant example of racial profiling, and one that the hotel mishandled egregiously. As Harrold wrote on Instagram, the manager “empowered her!!!” and “didn’t even consider the fact we were actually the guests.” As he later elaborated to Times, “They assumed he was guilty. The management didn’t even question her as to why she would even think he had the phone.” The family also told the Washington Post that the hotel’s security permit the woman to leave while they waited for police to arrive.
It was not until Sunday — after the video had circulated widely and prompted fierce outcry, much of which was directed at the hotel — that the Arlo issued a formal apology. In a statement provided to the Times, the hotel apologized for not doing enough to “de-escalate the dispute,” characterizing the incident as “baseless accusation, prejudice, and an assault against an innocent guest” that “no Arlo guest — or any person — should be subject to this kind of behavior.” The statement continued: “We are committed to making sure this never happens again at any of our hotels.”
Now, the incident is under investigation by the NYPD and the Manhattan DA’s office.
On Sunday, the NYPD confirmed that it is investigating the incident, though the department has declined to publicly identify the woman. Then, on Monday, the The Manhattan district attorney’s office told Intelligencer that the office had opened an investigation of its own. According to Harrold’s attorney, Ben Crump, the family believes the woman should face assault and battery charges.
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