When a Black woman in Virginia when her family leaves the house, a neighbor has been blasting recordings of monkeys, banjos, and racial slurs for years, but cops say there’s nothing they can do about it. “The monkey noises would start whenever we stepped out of our house,” Jannique Martinez of Virginia Beach told local station WAVY last week. “It’s also quite racist and unpleasant.” Martinez moved into the area five years ago, and the audio recordings began approximately a year and a half later, according to Martinez, who told CNN on Thursday that they appear to be triggered by motion sensors.
Martinez’s family isn’t the only one that hears the noises; according to Martinez, the sound that plays depending on who is leaving which property. Martinez published an audio file on Facebook last week that included monkey sounds, banjo music, and a man continuously repeating the N-word. “Everyone give the n***a dude a wave. A man’s voice says, “Say hello, n***a guy!” The audio appears to have been taken from a “South Park” episode. “[The neighbor] terrifies my son.” Martinez described her youngest child’s reaction to WAVY as “horrified, terrified.” “The situation with the N-word… ‘Mom, what’s that?’ they said as they approached me. That was not something I did to my children.
I didn’t imagine they’d have to figure out what this meant.” Martinez told CNN that she approached her neighbor about the recordings last year and requested him to tone down the volume; he claimed that he was not breaking any laws. The Virginia Beach Police Department said in a statement that it has responded to multiple calls to the property where the noise originates due to “nuisance/loud music complaints,” but that “there is nothing they can do.”
The city attorney and Virginia magistrates have separately assessed that the activities described thus far did not approach to a level that Virginia law defines as criminal behavior,” the police department said. It went on to say that it would keep a careful eye on the situation and that it would “assist this family with this most terrible circumstance, within the limitations of the law.” Martinez and her neighbor were not immediately available for comment when HuffPost reached out to them on Thursday.
