US community raises US$30,000 for Korean-American couple after man destroys their convenience store

Surveillance footage shows a man pulling a merchandise rack to the floor and swinging a street sign post into the glass on the refrigerators

Mark Sung, the son of the store owners, said his family hears insults every day that include statements such as, ‘Go back to your country’

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A screengrab from a video shows a man with a pole trashing a convenience store in Charlotte. Photo: Mark Sung/Grace Lee Sung via AP

Published: 10:54am, 4 Apr 2021Updated: 9:38pm, 4 Jun 2021

A convenience store in North Carolina, owned by a Korean-American couple, was trashed by a man who wielded a metal post and yelled racial slurs, according to US police and a son of the owners.

Surveillance footage shows a man pulling a merchandise rack to the floor and swinging a street sign post into the glass of the refrigerators. A man who appears to a friend of the attacker cheers him on.

The attack, which occurred at a store called Plaza Sundries in downtown Charlotte on Tuesday, falls in the wake of an attack on an Asian-American woman in New York City and the fatal shooting of eight people at three Atlanta-area massage businesses. Six of those victims were women of Asian descent.

Despite the increase in attention on such attacks, the violence and racially charged language was nothing new, said Mark Sung and his wife and his wife Grace Lee Sung.

“When my husband got the call [about the attack], it was like a routine,” Lee Sung said. “He was like, ‘Okay, check the mess. See the surveillance. File the (police) report’.”

The pandemic has fuelled the tension, the couple said, with some people blaming the coronavirus on the store’s owners. Sung’s parents have lived in the US for decades since moving from South Korea.

“It’s like, ‘Hey, you’re different’,” Lee Sung said, offering a sanitised summary of the insults. “‘You obviously can’t be from around here. Go back to your country’.”

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina. Photo: CMPD