EAST HAVEN — Moments after bystanders took cell phone video as Corrine Terrone of East Haven shouted racist slurs at a family in ShopRite, the woman called a non-emergency police line.
Presumably by accident, she called the Easton Police Department, reporting the altercation.
“I was talking to my kids and this black guy got up in front of me and said, ‘are you talking to me, b****?’” she told the dispatcher. “And I said, ‘No I’m not, n*****.’ And now they’re telling me I’m racial profiling.”
Andrew Tisdale was working the evening shift as a dispatcher for the Easton Police Department when he got a call around 6 p.m. from Terrone.
“I could hear screaming, a woman screaming when I answered,” said Tisdale. “She began berating me with information, something that happened at a ShopRite.”
The woman told Tisdale someone cussed at her and she called him the N-word.
“It started a spitting match,” said Tisdale. “Literally spitting at each other.”
Cell phone video shows Terrone spitting several times.
“I kind of started to realize this wasn’t in Easton, because we don’t have supermarkets here,” said Tisdale, adding that he told Terrone she called the wrong town. He said she hung up quickly after.
On Tuesday, East Haven Police provides surveillance video, which shows what happened in the moments leading up to the altercation.
After the videos went viral, Terrone was identified as a secretary for the Hamden Board of Education. School officials responded quickly and Terrone gave notice.
Tuesday afternoon, Terrone did not answer her front door. Just days ago, she told another Fox 61 reporter to leave.
Since Terrone was with her two young children when this all happened, Hamden schools — as mandatory reporters — were required to alert DCF, which is also now investigating the incident.
Police say, so far, no one has filed a complaint against Terrone.