San Diego State communication junior Feras Jabro was attacked and beaten to the ground during a protest in El Cajon after the shooting of Alfred Olango on Sept. 28.
He was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat at the Black Lives Matter protest.
Jabro recorded the incident through Periscope where over six thousand people watched it live.
Viewers saved the video from his Twitter and uploaded it to YouTube and Facebook where it now has over 7 million views.
Jabro is a resident of El Cajon and went to the protest to observe what was happening in his community.
He said someone in the protest called him out for his hat and soon after the crowd started attacking him.
After beating him up, the protesters burned his hat, which was signed by Donald Trump.
“I was beaten to the ground and savagely attacked, kicked, stomped on and spit on just for wearing a hat,” Jabro said. “It was like I was an animal to them. I wasn’t treated like another human being just for expressing my views.”
Jabro said he was so scared after the event that he completely privatized his Twitter and all other social medias.
During the incident, he said he was in a state of disbelief and feared for his life. After the attack he received death threats on Facebook from people telling him they were going to come find him.
“It’s extremely hypocritical,” Jabro said. “Here are these people assembling to protest a supposed unjust death, yet on a moment’s notice they go from exercising their first amendment right to a peaceful protest to assaulting me essentially for my choice of clothing that happened to have a political opinion behind it.”
Jabro did an interview with Gina Loudon which aired on YouToo America where he talked about his El Cajon protest incident. He said a few other media outlets reached out to him for interviews, but he declined out of fear for his life.
Trump’s campaign put out an official statement in regards to the incident.
John Woodrum and Patti Siegmann from the California Trump campaign reached out to Jabro on Facebook after noticing the video was getting a lot of media attention.
The indicent eventually got back to Trump himself, and he sent Jabro two new signed hats.
“I think part of the reason these people felt like what they did to me was okay is because we have such hateful rhetoric spewing out of this election,” Jabro said. “When you have a presidential candidate who reaches millions of people and says that half of Trump supporters are deplorable people, by definition racist, sexist homophobic people, that’s dangerous, scary rhetoric.”
The results of the election has caused protests over the nation including on campus.
“We’ve already seen so much violence and hatred on campuses across the nation as well as off campus,” international security and conflict resolution senior Shaila Homan said. “We can’t and we shouldn’t be digressing in our progress because we have a lot to fight for still and we can’t go backwards”
Students in opposition to Trump’s election as president protested on SDSU’s campus on Thursday.
Christopher Garcia, psychology pre-med senior, said he thought there was a divide in the country prior to the results of the election.
“I honestly feel like we were never the United States to begin with,” Garcia said.
“We were always on different sides we just never really voiced it out until like the election happened.”
