Video shows men yelling racial slurs during Bellingham fight

A video with millions of views online shows a man yelling a racial slur at a black man during a fight in downtown Bellingham early Saturday morning, Dec. 5.

The altercation took place around 12:30 a.m. on Railroad Street, said police Sgt. Mike Scanlon.

The video, which is a little over a minute long, appears to show a man punch a woman in the face during a struggle. The woman’s boyfriend, Serigne Diouf, who is black, is then seen exchanging swings with two other men. One of those men appears to jump on Diouf while someone yells a racial slur multiple times. The video also contains profanity.

The man who punched the woman has been identified by police as Mario Zamora, 26. He has been arrested via the summons process on suspicion of fourth-degree assault, Scanlon said.

The men who yelled racial slurs at Diouf will not be arrested, Scanlon said. He explained that to arrest somebody for a hate crime, there has to be more than a racial slur to constitute a racially biased incident.

Diouf said in an interview with The Bellingham Herald that the three men attacked him and his girlfriend because of his race.

“Because I am a black man they jumped on me and called me a (racial slur),” Diouf said.

Before the fight, Diouf said, he went downtown to pick up his girlfriend from The Royal Night Club. When he was parking, he said one of the three men approached his car, told him to leave, and called him a racial slur.

The three men, Scanlon said, had been kicked out of the bar for groping women shortly before the fight.

When Diouf came out of the night club with his girlfriend, they found the three men there. One of the men accused Diouf of having a gun, and Diouf said the men backed him up before one hit his girlfriend. Diouf said he does not own a gun, and police later confirmed that he had no gun at the time.

Police were not called, but an officer who happened to be patrolling in the area stepped in. Scanlon said the officer investigated what happened but didn’t believe he had enough evidence to make an arrest because, at the time, he had no independent witnesses, no one was significantly injured and everyone was intoxicated. Scanlon said Monday that the investigating officer did not watch the video.

Diouf, however, said he wasn’t drunk that night because he doesn’t drink. His girlfriend, he said, had a black eye.

Ashton Maden, the man who filmed the fight while repeating “World Star,” in reference to an aggregating video website, said he didn’t think the fight was a racial attack but admitted he didn’t see how it started. Even though he told police he filmed the fight, he said they never asked to see the footage.

Diouf has asked Maden to take down the video, but Maden has refused.

“I think my community has the right to see public violence in Bellingham,” Maden said. “I just filmed it for people to know, and I didn’t film it for bad intentions.”

The World Star website posted the video with the headline: “Messed Up: Racist Guys Attack An Interracial Couple in Washington State!” As of Wednesday afternoon, it had over 650,000 views.

The website mediatakeout.com also posted the video on its Facebook page, where it got more than 1.5 million views.

Speaking about the video, Scanlon said “what you can see there is a snippet of time.” He said such videos could be useful for officers if taken in context.

Diouf, a student at Whatcom Community College and president of a nonprofit organization called Africa Better Days, said Tuesday that he will continue to seek charges against the men who he said attacked him.

This story was originally published December 9, 2015 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Video shows men yelling racial slurs during Bellingham fight."