Four black student athletes who were going from door to door in their Arkansas community to fundraise were held at gunpoint and forced to the ground by a white woman until police arrived at the scene, officials said.
The teenagers were walking through Wynne, a city roughly 100 miles northeast of Little Rock, around 10 a.m. on Aug. 7 to raise money for their high school football team when Jerri Kelly, 46, stopped them.
Investigators have responded to a “suspicious persons” report to find the boys — two of whom had football jerseys on, according to school officials — on the ground with a woman standing by with a gun, police said. An officer asked the teens to stand up, and they explained they were selling discount cards for their school sports program.
“We was scared,” one of the teens told police, The Washington Post reported. “I thought she was going to shoot me in the head, how she was acting.”
The boys told authorities Kelly shouted at them, told them to get down and spread their legs and place their arms behind their backs, and called them liars when they said they were fundraising for school. When one of the boys reportedly tried swatting at a mosquito, Kelly allegedly told him she’d shoot if he didn’t stop moving.
A responding officer recognized one of the boys and told them they could get up and walk over to his patrol vehicle, the Post reported, citing a police report. At that point, Kelly allegedly called them back and began to lecture them about how her actions were not racially motivated.