Shocking video
Heartless gallery owner sprays homeless people with garden hose in San Francisco
A Tiktok video shows gallery owner Collier Gwin dousing a homeless woman in San Francisco with cold water from a garden hose. The heartless action goes viral. Gwin has no regrets and emphasizes that he tried to help the woman.
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Without batting an eyelid, Collier Gwin sprays a homeless woman with a garden hose.
Marian NadlerEditor News
The man casually leans against a railing while aiming a garden hose at a homeless woman on the sidewalk. The water just splashes, the woman screams in fear. The heartless action in freezing temperatures did not go unnoticed on Monday morning. A video of the shock moment quickly spread across social media and was viewed millions of times.
The man shown in the viral video is Collier Gwin, 69. He owns the art gallery Foster Gwin Gallery in San Francisco. US billionaire David Rockefeller and Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger were once among his customers.
The good reputation of his gallery should now be over. Outraged social media users retaliated by posting masses of bad reviews about the Foster Gwin Gallery online. The gallery’s rating on Google dropped to just one star.
This is how the gallery owner justified the heartless campaign
But the art connoisseur shows no remorse. Gwin’s justification for the action: he just wanted to help. The woman became psychotic and knocked over garbage cans.
“I said, ‘You have to go, I can’t clean the street, go away’,” the 69-year-old described the situation to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The homeless got completely out of control, started screaming and spitting at him, Gwin defends himself. He sees himself as a “champion” because he tried to help. The woman was woken up by the cold water from her psychosis and calmed down.
The chef at Brioche Cafe, a small bakery not far from Collier Gwin’s gallery, captured the viral video. “I was shocked,” said Edson Garcia.
Growing homelessness crisis in San Francisco
However, the scene did not take place directly in front of Gwin’s gallery, but in front of the “Barbarossa Lounge” restaurant right next to it. That’s why the restaurant was initially showered with hate messages until its owner Arash Ghanadan (41) rejected the allegations.
“The last three years have been a tough time for our company with a pandemic. We barely survived that and now our reputation is being ruined by a video that everyone mistakenly assumes is related to our company,” Ghanadan told the Daily Mail.
The video was made amid a growing homelessness crisis in the city. The social research institute Applied Survey Research (ASR) put the number of homeless people in San Francisco at 7,754 in February last year.