Man who called police in video apologizes
Says he’s sorry for making black software engineer feel ‘unfairly targeted’
The YouTube employee filmed calling police on a black man visiting a friend at a San Francisco condo building last week said Tuesday that he had approached the situation with a “unique history”: His father was killed in 2012 by a trespasser outside his parents’ Berkeley home.
In a statement posted to Medium late Tuesday, Christopher Cukor — who is white — both apologized for making Dictionary.com software engineer Wesly Michel feel “unfairly targeted” for his race and defended his own actions in the July 4 incident captured in Michel’s now-viral video.
The recording shows Cukor, accompanied by his young son, con
fronting Michel outside the condo building on Van Ness Avenue and demanding to know who he is visiting in the building, then calling police to report a “trespasser,” while his child tearfully begs him to stop.
From behind the camera, Michel implores Cukor to “listen to your son,” and warns “you’re going to be the next person on TV.”
The video spread rapidly across social media, with more than 1.6 million views on Facebook and 3.5 million views on Twitter as of Tuesday night.
With many critics casting him as the latest white person caught calling 911 to report an unsubstantiated threat by a person of color, Cukor said Tuesday that the video did not tell the full story of what he titled the “incident in a San Francisco doorway.”
“Here’s where the complexity begins,” he wrote. “My father was murdered outside his home by a trespasser who he confronted alone. For my child’s safety, my safety and that of the building, I felt it was necessary to get help in this situation.”
As this news organization reported at the time, Cukor’s father, Peter Cukor, was bludgeoned to death in the yard of his Berkeley home on Feb. 18, 2012, after the police did not respond to his call reporting a trespasser on his property.
In the wake of Peter Cukor’s death, the Cukor family filed a lawsuit against the city of Berkeley, blaming police for failing to respond to Peter Cukor’s call to a non911 “emergency number.” Transcripts of the call obtained by this news organization showed the 67-yearold requesting urgent assistance to deal with an apparently mentally ill man who was trying to get into the Cukors’ house.
“We find this very disturbing — that a citizen’s call for emergency help can go unanswered and lead to his death is not a mistake?” Christopher Cukor told reporters here in 2012. “My father should be alive.”
The family withdrew the wrongful death suit after the city agreed to make changes to its emergency response system.
In his statement Tuesday, Christopher Cukor does not go into detail about his father’s death. He added that he had previously encountered trespassers in his building — a Nob Hill highrise where two bedroom, two bathroom condos sell for upwards of $1.5 million — and that he has been robbed several times by “bad actors” of “all different colors.”
Cukor did not say whether he raised any of these concerns with Michel prior to calling 911. He does note that he later learned Michel was visiting a guest of a resident of the building, and says that “the building resident was not expecting Wesly.”
Attempts to reach Michel for comment on Cukor’s statement were unsuccessful. Cukor has similarly not responded to multiple requests for comment.
In a statement Monday, the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that officers had responded to the July 4 altercation, and after interviewing both men involved, determined no crime had occurred.
In his statement Tuesday, Cukor closed by apologizing to Michel, acknowledging the “terrible pattern” of white people calling 911 to report black people for seemingly trivial or nonexistent crimes. Stories and videos of these racial profiling incidents have proliferated across the internet in recent years, after a recording of a white woman calling police on two black men barbecuing near Oakland’s Lake Merritt went viral.
“The last thing I ever intended was to echo that history — and I’m sorry my actions caused Wesly to feel unfairly targeted due to his race,” Cukor wrote.