And so begins the latest viral video in which a white person accosts a black person for no apparent reason.
In this case, Chika Okafor, 29, a producer for sports website Bleacher Report, was waiting in the lobby of his apartment building Wednesday for a Lyft to take him to his company’s holiday party.
But as Okafor and a friend, also black, stood in the lobby, the unidentified white man berated them.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Okafor’s white neighbor said. “I’ve lived here 27 years.”
Okafor says he has lived in the building, a four-story walk-up on First Avenue near 74th Street, since last year.
The exchange, which was captured on video and shared by Okafor on his social media accounts, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.
As the video racked up views, people tied it to other incidents involving white people calling police on black people going about their lives.
“Hallway Harry,” as the unidentified man has been named on social media, follows the likes of “BBQ Becky,” who called police on two black men who were grilling in a park in Oakland, California; “Permit Patty” who summoned authorities in San Francisco on an 8-year-old black girl for “illegally selling water without a permit;” and here in New York, “Cornerstore Caroline,” who called police in Brooklyn on a black boy who she falsely said groped her in a bodega.
As of October, The Times had identified 39 instances this year in which a white person called the police on black people engaging in regular activities.
“I felt insulted,” Okafor said of the encounter. “I felt violated. To me, his behavior suggested that, one, because we were people of color we were a threat to their safety, and, two, because we are people of color we can’t afford to live in that type of apartment complex.”
He added: “It’s the Upper East Side. It’s considered to be one of the wealthy parts of Manhattan. It’s a nice apartment.”
The neighbor similarly accosted a white couple just hours after the encounter with Okafor.
Janah Reynolds, who is visiting New York for the holidays with her husband and two sons, was renting an apartment on the first floor of the building through Airbnb. After dropping their bags at the apartment Wednesday, Reynolds and her husband went out while her mother-in-law stayed with the children.
When Reynolds and her husband returned to the building, she said, the same man refused to let them in, telling them it was illegal for them to rent an apartment for just a few nights. (Many New Yorkers illegally rent out their apartments on Airbnb, though it is not clear whether this particular rental was legal.)
Reynolds, who posted a video of their heated confrontation as a comment on Okafor’s Facebook post, said that she and her husband waited more than an hour before the man finally relented and let them into the apartment where their children were waiting. She said they called police multiple times, but officers never came.
Okafor said that he has sublet an apartment in the building since last December. His video shows the man repeatedly asking him which apartment he lived in, information that Okafor refused to give.
“It is none of his business,” Okafor said in a phone interview Monday. “He doesn’t own the building. Just because he has lived there for 27 years, it doesn’t give him the right to interrogate other people.”
The neighbor has yet to be identified, and neither Okafor nor Janah Reynolds knew his name. Okafor had never seen him in the building before the encounter.
Okafor said he reported the incident to the building manager and that she told him she could not address personal matters and advised him to report the incident to police if he wanted to pursue legal action.
The manager, Cathy Burton, did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Okafor, who is spending the holidays in Chicago, said he planned to re-sign his lease, and though he did not plan to pursue legal action, he was expecting an apology from the man, and he thinks the man should be evicted from the building.
“I’m not going to change how I live my life based on this guy’s inappropriate behavior,” Okafor said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.