A minister apologized Sunday after a video that he posted to Facebook of a woman in a wheelchair being towed by a car went viral one day earlier.
In the video, recorded by the Rev. Lamond Rushing of the Faith Worship Family Center in Kansas City, Missouri, a woman sits in a motorized wheelchair as a pickup truck pulls her over snow-covered roads.
"Only in Kansas City," Rushing said as he recorded the woman. "Do (you all) see this?"
Before Rushing took the video down Sunday, it had been viewed more than 1 million times and shared 11,000 times, WDAF reported. Comments on the video were overwhelmingly insulting, with many commenters mocking the woman and others taking the minister to task for filming her instead of offering help.
The woman, Becky Kittrell, told WDAF that a driver offered to tow her Saturday after the battery died on her motorized wheelchair as dangerously low temperatures descended on the area.
"If I get stuck for a period of time and stuff, I get so cold," she told the news station.
She questioned Rushing's decision to record her predicament.
"He should have just (come) and asked me something, if I needed some help or something," she told WDAF. "I just needed, just somebody to help me."
Lamond apologized in an interview with WDAF. He said he recorded the video because of its unusual nature and not to make fun of the woman.
"I didn't even think it would even go (anywhere)," he told WDAF. "When I read the comments, I saw then. I saw then, but I didn't mean (any) harm.
"I would apologize from the bottom of my heart. I would never ever intend to try to make fun of her or anything like that."
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