Woman charged with hate crime in Palo Alto attack

SAN JOSE >> A hate crime charge was levied against a Santa Clara woman following an alleged attack on a man of Middle Eastern descent last Friday in Palo Alto.

Sarah Ann Neal, 42, went on “an anti-immigrant tirade” against what a police investigation revealed was a Middle Eastern man in his 50s, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.

Neal, who is White, is accused of approaching the man for money on California Avenue and then striking him with a laptop while berating him. According to prosecutors, when the man told Neal he had no money for her, “‘She said, ‘You don’t even belong in my country.’ ”

Neal allegedly then asked for the man’s identification, and when he refused, she struck him with a laptop, reached for a no-parking sign to further hit him with, and told him, “You are the reason the country is going down.”

“We will have no tolerance for criminal intolerance in this county,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “We are all immigrants here.”

The incident occurred on the 300 block of California Avenue, not far from Page Mill Road and El Camino Real. A witness, according to the District Attorney’s Office, heard Neal curse at the victim and call him an immigrant as she fled the scene. She was arrested, in possession of a laptop, a short time later by Palo Alto Police several blocks down El Camino, on Los Robles Ave.

Neal was charged with battery and a hate crime, both misdemeanors.