More than 100 protesters on Monday demonstrated at the home of a New Jersey man who was captured on video verbally attacking a neighbor with racist slurs, before reading his address and challenging the neighbor to “come see me.”
The videos of the Friday altercation, which run for more than six minutes, show a man, later identified as Edward Cagney Mathews, yelling racist slurs at his Black neighbor and pushing up against him with his chest.
The neighbor is also seen pushing Mathews at one point.
Edwards appears to call the neighbor a slur, and at one point says, “Learn your laws… it’s not Africa.”
The neighbor responded that he was born in America.
Minutes into the altercation Mathews looks at the camera and reads off his address, before saying “come f—ing see me” and “bring whoever.”
Videos of the rant received hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter.
On Monday, three days after the altercation, protesters began arriving at the address Mathews yelled in the video, chanting “We want Edward!” and “Come outside,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
By Monday night, the crowd at Mathews’s house appeared to have increased to more than 100 people. The protesters reportedly cheered and threw food and water bottles at him, according to The Washington Post.
Mathews was taken into custody on Monday evening, according to the Inquirer. Video posted to Twitter shows police clearing a path through the crowd of protesters to bring Mathews, who was handcuffed, into a police car.
The Mount Laurel Police Department said it charged Mathews with harassment and biased intimidation, after authorities conducted an investigation.
Police said they first received a report of the incident when a resident of the neighborhood reported that “she is continually harassed by her neighbor, Edward Cagney Mathews.”
Burlington County Prosecutor Scott A. Coffina reportedly said that his office is charging Mathews with assault as well, according to the Post.
Mathews, during a phone interview with the Inquirer, apologized for the way he acted and said it was sparked by a longtime housing dispute with the homeowners’ association.
He also told the newspaper that he was drunk.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting an encounter like that and certainly wasn’t expecting to disrespect anybody,” Mathews said, according to the Inquirer. “Let me be clear: That is no excuse for what I said, but I lost my temper.”
He said he did not mean for his slurs to be racist, and contended that he uses the same language when speaking to white people.
“Anybody that knows me know that I just talk like this,” he told the Inquirer.