Sharyl Ann Curtis was arraigned Monday in Spokane County Superior Court on the hate crime charges after being arrested by police on Oct. 31 and spending a night in jail. She is now free, awaiting trial later this year.

The hate crime spree began, police say, when Tyree Brown, who’s African-American, answered a knock at his apartment door that Halloween night as children were trick-or-treating in the Hillyard neighborhood of northeast Spokane.

When Brown opened his door, he was greeted by someone wearing a hooded, white sheet, with the letters “KKK” on the front, court documents say. A female voice was yelling “niggers,” demanding candy. The costumed visitor yelled the epithet “so many times” that Brown couldn’t count them all, the charging documents say.

As the hooded stranger walked away to nearby parking lot, she shed her KKK costume and Brown saw Sharyl Ann Curtis, whom he recognized “from fights and previous incidents in the neighborhood,” the documents say. Curtis had been arrested by police a few months earlier for threatening other neighbors, but those charges were dropped.

In the parking lot, police said Curtis waved a spray bottle containing liquid. “She yelled that it was bleach water and that she would make everyone white,” the court documents say.

Brown’s two children, identified in the court documents as “T.B.” and “K.B.,” were standing nearby, and Curtis sprayed the bottle toward them. [...]

After reading Curtis her constitutional rights, the officer said he attempted to question Curtis, who responded by promptly raising her right arm in a Nazi-like salute and proclaiming: “I will raise my son white power because there are niggers out there.”

The court documents allege she then told the officer: “Don’t assault me because you’re a nigger lover. My son will shoot a cop one day, and I will give him the ammo.” She extended her middle finger on numerous occasions, they say, shouting at the officer, “Nigger lover, fuck you.” [...]

Interviewed in jail the following day by a reporter with KHQ-TV, Curtis was still in denial, claiming she was the “real victim.”

“What did I do actually?’’ she asked in the interview. “What is proven that I did? Did I hurt anybody? There is no proof of that because I didn’t. I was trick-or-treating with my son and they surrounded us.” [...]