A woman was charged with attempted murder after the car she was driving struck two people during a demonstration for racial justice in California that clashed with a counterprotest on Saturday, the authorities said.
The driver, Tatiana Turner, of Long Beach, Calif., was also charged with assault with a deadly weapon, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release.
The protest, which took place in Yorba Linda, about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles, was organized by Caravan4Justice, a grass roots protest group that campaigns against police brutality.
It was met by a group of counterprotesters, some waving “Trump 2020” flags and wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
The police estimated that a total of 150 people from both contingents began protesting at 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thirty minutes later, the police said the crowd swelled to about 250 people. The groups began to clash and scream at each other, videos show.
The Sheriff’s Department said it received reports of demonstrators carrying weapons and “physical altercations” between the groups, with at least one protester pepper-spraying another. The authorities declared the gathering an unlawful assembly and told the crowds to disperse, the department said.
After several dispersal orders, a white sedan in the Yorba Linda Public Library parking lot, driven by Ms. Turner, lurched through a crowd and hit two people, a man and a woman, the police said.
Ms. Turner, who officials said was attending the protest as part of the Caravan4Justice group, continued driving as a swarm of protesters tried to stop her car. She was taken into custody at the scene. It was not immediately clear on Sunday whether Ms. Turner, 40, had a lawyer.
The two injured were taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening and were expected to survive, Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Department, said on Sunday.
It was unclear whether they were part of the Caravan4Justice group or the counterprotest group because both groups had converged at the time, she said.
On Thursday, a driver plowed through a crowd of people in Hollywood who were protesting the decision not to charge the Louisville police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor during a botched raid of her apartment in March.
There have been dozens of similar incidents involving cars striking demonstrators at protests against racism and police brutality across the country in the months since George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis in May.
In Bloomington, Ind., a woman who was accused of driving her car through a crowd of protesters, injuring at least two people, was charged with two counts of criminal recklessness, a felony, and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in serious bodily injury.
In Seattle, the authorities said a man drove into a protest, killing one demonstrator. He was charged with vehicular homicide, vehicular assault and reckless driving. And a man was arrested in June in Brooklyn after striking at least one person with his car during a Black Lives Matter march.
