*L’Daijohnique Lee is a Black Dallas woman who has filed a lawsuit against the city, a local bar and Austin Shuffield, a white man who beat her in an attack in 2019 that was caught on camera.
In her lawsuit, Lee alleges that Shuffield, now 32, berated her with racial slurs while physically attacking her in an altercation in a parking lot in March 2019, The Dallas Morning News
reported. Lee also contends that the bar where Shuffield worked had served him too many drinks and likely should never have employed him. She also noted that the city did her wrong by trying to arrest her following the incident.
Video of the parking lot assault shows Shuffield punching Lee multiple times. Demetria Obilor, a TV reporter, tweeted that Lee, now 26, was charged with felony criminal mischief because she broke Shuffield’s car windows after he assaulted her.
When she went to call the police, the man knocked her cell phone out of her hands and began attacking her. According to The Dallas Morning News, Lee needed to be hospitalized afterward and later revealed that she was so traumatized that she slept at hotels out of fear, reports Blavity.
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DEEP ELLUM ATTACK AFTERMATH: L’Daijohnique Lee, 24, who was brutalized by Austin Shuffield, 30, last month in Deep Ellum, Dallas, TX has been charged with felony criminal mischief because she broke her attacker’s car windows after he pulled a gun on her and punched her many times pic.twitter.com/AtlbCPFkgo
— Demetria Obilor (@DemetriaObilor) April 3, 2019
Lee’s suit, filed in Dallas County district court, seeks an unlisted amount of damages. Her lawsuit argues that Shuffield beat, assaulted and left her terrified of the potential for additional harm.
Court documents allege that the man was intoxicated at the time and that the bar High & Tight had allowed him to buy drinks “after it was apparent … that Shuffield was intoxicated to the extent that he presented a clear danger to himself and others.”
Shuffield’s lawyers told The Dallas Morning News that the case has been “reverse engineered to have a different narrative for how everything went down,” expressing that the 26-year-old woman brought up the allegations “after the fact” and failed to communicate the presence of a gun or the man’s racist rant in the initial police report.
Additionally, Shuffield’s attorney said that the legal measure against his client was unexpected and that they aim to file a counterclaim and request Lee’s deposition.
“I did not think that she would have the audacity to put this in writing and open herself up to a counterclaim and a deposition, which is going to happen pretty quickly if we have any say in it,” lawyer Scott Palmer said.
Shuffield, by the way, was let go from his job at the bar shortly after the video went public, according to NBC.
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