An eyewitness to last Wednesday’s bathroom altercation at the Beczak Center told The Ledger Monday night that she saw County Legislator James Nolan‘s mother and former Skipper campaign worker Stephanie Holguin trying to hit Kisha Skipper, Nolan’s Democratic opponent. Nolan, a Republican who represents District 15, rejects that account. His mother “was the victim of this,” he said, adding that she was punched in the face and scratched.
The account comes six days after an altercation that has since played out largely online. Nolan and Holguin gave a joint interview Monday to The Yonkers Voice. Parody images have cast the two candidates as boxers, and online sleuths have posted photos from campaign events, circled in red to flag what they present as evidence of Holguin’s ties to Nolan.
Skipper has kept a low profile, while supporters, including the Westchester Democratic Committee and the local chapter of New York Indivisible, have denounced the police response, particularly the decision to detain Skipper and take her from the center in handcuffs.
Skipper is the president of the Yonkers chapter of the NAACP. Her predecessor in that post, Tanika Inlaw-Chambers, joined in the condemnation of the police response. “A Black woman is followed into a restroom, and reports being assaulted,” Inlaw-Chambers said in a statement Sunday. “Yet somehow, she is the one escorted away in handcuffs and detained by police!
“Where is the outrage? Where is the accountability? And where is the equal treatment under the law?”
UPDATE OCT 7, 8:50 AM. An official summary of the surveillance video contradicts Holguin’s public statements about what occurred. In an interview on Yonkers Voice Monday, Holguin said that she entered the bathroom first, and was followed in by Kisha Skipper. The surveillance video summary describes a woman matching the description of Kisha Skipper entering the bathroom at about 8:20 p.m., with a woman matching the description of Holguin entering 9 seconds later. See below for more.
Police Investigation Ongoing
Yonkers police said that they are still conducting an investigation. “There is no further information to be released at this time as the investigation is ongoing,” police spokesman Frank M. DiDomizio said in an email statement. “We are still conducting interviews, reviewing accounts/evidence, etc.” The Westchester District Attorney’s office declined to comment.
Skipper was taken to the police station and released the same night without being charged, police said.
As the investigation enters its seventh day, and with election day one week away, the evidence that could quell the storm of accusations and counteraccusations — the Beczak Center CCTV footage — has not been released.
The Oct. 21 candidate forum was sponsored by the Hudson River Community Association and the Ludlow Park Residents Association.
All accounts of the altercation agree that there were three women in the bathroom: Skipper; Donna Nolan, James Nolan’s mother; and Stephanie Holguin, a former Skipper campaign worker who changed sides and joined with Nolan. First, the three were there with the door closed. When the door opened, people standing outside heard the screaming and shouting. Some ran to offer help.
Skipper declined to speak to The Ledger, and Donna Nolan declined through her son. Holguin could not be reached.
Oquendo-Thomas Campaign Manager is First Eyewitness to Enter
Christine Nicol was at the forum in her capacity as campaign manager for 17th District candidate Leslye Oquendo-Thomas. Contacted by The Ledger Monday night for comment, Nicol said she was standing at the back of the room where the candidate forum was taking place, heard the commotion, and then ran down a hallway to the bathroom and went in.
“I get outside the woman’s bathroom, and the door’s already open at this point, so I was not there when the door was closed, the bathroom door was already open,” Nicol said. “Kisha turned around to me and said they tried to lock me in the bathroom. At that moment, Donna and Stephanie both started swinging at Kisha. I do not know if they made contact or not.”
“So it was not shoving,” Nicol continued. “It wasn’t like a forward motion of a shove. It was a swinging of the arms. I know they were trying to come at her with their hands, but I cannot say whether or not they landed.”
Nicol is a political consultant who works primarily in New York City and freely admits she is a progressive, the polar opposite of Nolan’s Republican viewpoint. However, she asserts she has no bias, in large part because she has felt that Nolan — or at least Donna Nolan — supports Oquendo-Thomas over her opponent, endorsed Democratic candidate Wilson Terrero.
Nolan Says His Mother was the Victim
Nolan totally rejects Nicol’s version of the altercation. “My mother didn’t swing on anybody, my mother was the victim of this,” he told The Ledger Monday night. “There’s a lot of misconceptions out there of what’s going on, and the truth of the matter is my mother’s the one that got punched in the face several times,” he said. “She had a busted lip, she had scratches all down her face, because when she actually got punched in the mouth four times, and she was being dragged away, Kisha, she scratched down my mother’s face.”
“But this definitely has taken away from the election and what it’s more about doing what’s right for the constituents,” he said. “I really don’t want to speak about this anymore because I want to make sure that constituents know, hey, there is somebody running to represent you guys in the best capacity I possibly can and continue to deliver results.”
Two other eyewitnesses contacted by The Ledger, although sympathetic to Skipper, did not confirm either account. Eric Johnson, Skipper’s campaign treasurer and vice president of the NAACP, was the third to get to the bathroom. “It was a circus from the very beginning,” he said. “They follow her [Kisha] in and they call her an aggressor? It feeds into every trope about the angry Black woman.” However, Johnson emphasized that he didn’t see physical contact — he arrived after it had just ended.
The other eyewitness, Chevaughan Dixon, is seen in a video posted on social media pulling Skipper out of the room. He later went to the police station to be interviewed by detectives and was shown CCTV footage from the center. He declined any further comment about the incident, other than to urge the police to release the video footage. “The Beczak Center video speaks for itself,” he said. “The people deserve to see the evidence from the cameras that were rolling in Beczak.”
Beczak has CCTV cameras throughout the facility, including one in the ceiling of the hallway outside the bathroom. The angle of the camera does not allow it to see into the bathroom, but activity in the hallway would be in full view. Footage from this camera could show who went into the bathroom first, when Donna Nolan arrived and when the door was closed and opened — all details that remain in dispute.
UPDATE: Official Video Summary Contradicts Holguin’s Public Account
A narrative summary of surveillance video taken from outside the bathroom clearly describes the sequence of events in the hallway, corroborating eyewitness accounts provided to The Ledger, and contradicting a key aspect of Holguin’s public version of the story. The Beczak Center is a county-owned facility, jointly licensed by Sarah Lawrence College and the Beczak Environmental Education Center. Security officials from Sarah Lawrence reviewed the video and provided the summary, which was obtained by The Ledger.
According to the summary, a Yonkers police officer on the scene initially reported that Skipper had been assaulted. “As per Yonkers Police Officer McDonough stated [sic] That a black Older female was assaulted in the bathroom by a Spanish female and a white female.”
The summary also describes a woman matching the description of Donna Nolan entering the bathroom 68 seconds after Holguin, with the door closing her behind 10 seconds later. The bathroom door is usually kept open at the facility. About 30 seconds later the door opens, and 23 seconds after that a woman matching the description of Nicol runs down the hall.
The summary also notes that six seconds later, the woman matching the description of Skipper is “observed swinging arms as if to strike,” just as she is being pulled away by one of two men who have run down the hall. This is consistent with the accounts provided by Johnson and Dixon, who said that as they attempted to break up the altercation Skipper was trying to swing back in self defense. A screenshot of the summary is below:
