Business owner searching for vandal who tagged her Northeast Philadelphia restaurant

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- A Northeast Philadelphia restaurant owner is on edge after two attacks on her business in the last month.

Tamekah Bost, who owns the Better Box, LLC in Holmesburg, says the most recent incident was Sunday night when she caught a man on surveillance video tagging the side of her restaurant.

The text said "Brdoe." A comment on her Instagram about the graffiti used the same spelling, with the caption "Free Brdoe." The timing of it concerned her.

"There's just no way that this isn't intentional," she said.

Prior to the graffiti incident, on April 26, Bost says a man came to her restaurant when it was closed and pulled out a weapon on her 19-year-old employee.

According to Bost, the man told the employee, "you don't belong here."

"He used a racial slur, he spit in his face, and all of this because he told him 'we're not open today,'" she said.

Police arrested that man on charges including assault. Bost says her employee quit, saying he doesn't feel safe in this neighborhood.

"Here we are three weeks later and we have a young man come and tag our building," she said.

That happened Sunday night and Bost thinks it may be related to the assault. She also says she was hesitant to call police about the vandalism.

"I would rather have conversation and get an apology and understand what was the reason for this," she said, but she also wants to feel safe at work.

"I would like to say these incidents have been isolated, but then you have more than one," she said. "We don't want to make it about race, we don't want to make it a racial thing, we just want to be left alone."

Northeast Detectives are handling both the assault and the vandalism. The owner says she hopes it's resolved quickly so she can go back to peacefully running her business.