A woman falsely accused the 14-year-old son of prominent jazz musician Keyon Harrold of taking her cellphone and demanded that he give it back.
The confrontation took place at the Arlo hotel in Manhattan, where the father-son duo was staying.
“He’s the sweetest, most genuine kid you could ask for,” Harrold said in an interview.
“I was just appalled at how he was treated.”
Harrold was able to capture parts of the altercation in a cellphone video, showing the woman insisting that the teenager had the phone, yelling at him and eventually tackling him.
She also tried to look in his pockets, while a hotel manager tries to settle the situation.
“I’m not letting him walk away with my phone!” the woman demanded.
The trumpeter accused the woman of scratching him and tackling his son after he stopped filming.
“I am furious!!! We see this crap happening all the time, but it hits different when it hits home!!!” Harrold wrote on Instagram while sharing the video.
“They assumed he was guilty,” he added.
“The management didn’t even question her as to why she would even think he had the phone.”
According to the hotel staff, an Uber driver returned the phone in question shortly afterward.
In a statement, Arlo Hotels said it was “deeply disheartened about the recent incident of baseless accusation, prejudice and assault against an innocent guest.”
“In investigating the incident further, we’ve learned that the manager on duty promptly called the police regarding the woman’s conduct and that hotel security intervened to prevent further violence; still, more could have been done to deescalate the dispute.”
The teen’s mother, Katty Rodriguez, called out the hotel’s apology, and claimed that it tried to sweep an extremely traumatic incident for her son under a rug.
“The only reason we decided to go public and post on social media was because the hotel which had a security guard on duty let this young lady leave while waiting for the police to respond after she assaulted my son several times which is not seen on this video because my sons father dropped the phone to protect our son!”