Minneapolis City Council member LaTrisha Vetaw recalled getting sprayed when a man targeted Omar yesterday.
Vetaw said Omar was making her remarks when she heard someone get up and yell.
“I didn’t hear what he said, but I saw him get up, and he was yelling, and I’m looking right at him, and this syringe just goes up, and this liquid just starts to come towards us,” she told NBC News. “I saw her be hit by the liquid, and then immediately I went to her saying: ‘Hey, you’ve got to go get checked out. We don’t know what that is.’”
Vetaw said she was worried and scared.
“Because there was a foreign liquid, I don’t know what it is, we’re packed in this room, the room is hot, there was a lot of people in there. I didn’t know if there were other people in the room with this liquid,” she said.
“It could have been airborne; it could have been acid that he sprayed. I didn’t know what it was, so I was terrified,” she continued.
She became emotional as she recalled fearing for the safety of her staff members in the room with her.
“I was so scared, like we were in danger. My worst fear is that I’ll have to call one of their parents and say something happened. So I was terrified,” she said.
After Omar was hit, she continued to talk to the crowd, which appeared to calm the room down, Vetaw said. Vetaw later started to gag because of the smell, which she described as vinegar or ammonia.
“Then I realized it’s on me, it’s not just the smell in the air,” she said, noting that her blazer was sprayed.
She said the moment was “even scarier” than normal because of incidents in the city during Trump’s Operation Metro Surge.
“I think everybody’s on edge,” she said.
