After being caught on video intentionally coughing on a customer with cancer while in a Pier 1 store, Debra Hunter is now known as the “Pier 1 cougher.” However, but she has been called much, much worse. And now, she’s paying the price of her actions.
Hunter was charged with misdemeanor assault and is facing up to 60 days in jail. With her next sentence hearing in a week, she has been tirelessly attempting to explain what went down in that exact moment.
While she regrets what she did immensely, she wants it to be known that there were moments leading up to the action that weren’t necessarily caught on film, and she was just trying to protect her kids from a stranger filming them.
“Admittedly I was immediately infuriated and demanded this customer to stop filming my kids,” she explained in a letter to the judge. “In the heat of the moment, I overreacted in an over protective manner which ultimately led to my retaliation on this stranger, the victim. And that highly regrettable, split second, knee jerk reaction has cost my family dearly.”
Among her letter, Hunter submitted a whopping 23 pages of insults and threats she’s received as a result of the incident—everything from the mild end of calling her “disgusting” to telling her to “kill herself,” among many others.
Hunter says that life is very different now than what once was. But not only has her life been tuned upside down, so has her kid’s—and she says they don’t deserve that. “My kids should not have to pay for my mistake,” she said. “Each of my three children have lost nearly every friend they had.”
“I went from ‘that mom’ to ‘that woman,'” she said, adding that she realizes “this all may sound like a bad movie script.”
To end it, she left the judge (and the general public) with this thought: “I often wonder what it would be like if every one of us, as the flawed human beings we are, had their worst moments reduced to a short video for all the world to see and judge.”
Stay tuned for what will happen at her next hearing, but in the meantime, to see what went down in Pier 1 that day, check out the video below.
What do you think of Hunter’s actions in this video above? What do you think her consequence should be for what she did?