Posted on 09/05/2015 4:18:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Eyewitness account claims man was "trying to buy groceries with his EBT card and ended up in a stretcher"
Editor's Note: The photographs posted on this page are graphic in nature.
Whole Foods has fired a security guard at one of its Oakland locations after photographs of a bloody altercation between a customer and the guard surfaced on Facebook.
Zoe Marks, a fellow at Edinburgh University, was visiting Oakland, when she posted an eyewitness account Thursday of what she described as a “horrific” incident at the Whole Foods Market near Lake Merritt. Marks said the customer "was trying to buy groceries with his EBT card and ended up in a stretcher."
An EBT or Electronic Benefit Transfer card is a replacement for paper food stamps and checks.
“I just saw a young man violently assaulted by an armed security guard at Whole Foods, slammed repeatedly against concrete pillars, put in a chokehold, restrained, and suffocated until he was thrown face down on the pavement unconscious. The guard locked him out of the store despite the fact he was immobile," Marks wrote. In an email, a spokesperson for the supermarket chain said the security guard, who has been "permanently removed from Whole Foods Market," got involved after the customer made physical contact with a store employee.
Whole Foods Market "takes a zero tolerance approach to violence," the spokesperson said.
Marks's photographs show an unidentified man with a black jacket lying on the floor bleeding. Paramedics can be seen attending to the man in another photograph. According to Marks, not a single employee at Whole Foods called the paramedics. It is not immediately clear what events took place right before the altercation. According to Marks: “He was trying to buy groceries with his EBT card and ended up in a stretcher."
Marks wrote she spent an hour giving a written statement to Oakland police officers who showed up at the scene. Requests for comment from Oakland police were not immediately returned.
“I'm sorry for more graphic images of violence against black citizens, but I was here and spoke to the victim (to keep him conscious), perpetrator, several bystanders, and cops,” Marks wrote. “Armed private guards cannot be tolerated in our grocery stores and communities when this is what they do to paying customers. Whole Foods needs to be held accountable — security is NOT selective, it is collective.”
Whole Foods responded on their Facebook page Friday, admitting “there was an altercation that escalated to violence.”
“The graphic images circulating on Facebook and Twitter are disturbing to say the least,” the statement said. “Whole Foods Market considers the safety and security of all team members, customers and members of our community a top priority. The security guard involved in the incident has been suspended, and we are actively investigating the details with our security firm. While we move swiftly to gather the facts, we want to make it clear that Whole Foods Market takes a zero tolerance approach to violence.”
Marks also posted a one-star review of the 230 Bay Place Whole Foods Market on Yelp: "It's time to disarm your guards and put customers first. This young man was violently assaulted by an aggressive security officer while trying to buy groceries with EBT," her comment, which included the graphic photographs, said.
"Horrified customers stayed on the scene for hours," she wrote, adding that they demanded calls to paramedics and "shouted they would never shop at Whole Foods Oakland again."
"I hope that Whole Foods does reveal their fact finding with transparency," Terry De Grace-Morris wrote on Whole Food's Facebook page. "This kind of behavior by law enforcement personnel is no longer tolerated or excused."
Patchouli covers the smell of stank ass quite well.
“The times that I’ve been in Whole Foods, I’ve felt like I’m in an episode of Portlandia.”
Haven’t been in one for years, but used to occasionally stop in the store in Boulder, if you can believe it. The biggest bunch of RUDE, rich, entitled, yuppie assholes racing around and constantly bumping into each other. Women all looked like emaciated workout addicts and/or entitled professor’s wives. The whole vib just gave me the creeps. And the prices were insane. Actually,this is making me want to stop by again and just be a fly on the wall for a few minutes and observe this bizarre bunch and see if anything has changed.
“why is there a need to point out that the person was using EBT by the “whistle blower”?”
For the poor oppressed victim narrative.
Facts? You’re hopelessly old fashioned.
Facts that get in the way of the libtard narrative of victimhood are trumped by images and emotion.
Next time, let the downtrodden victim assault any number of his oppressors in the store. The job of the security is apparently to stand by and cheer him on.
If only there was a way to make it so only libtards suffered from their own insanity.
>>Haven’t been in one for years, but used to occasionally stop in the store in Boulder, if you can believe it. The biggest bunch of RUDE, rich, entitled, yuppie assholes racing around and constantly bumping into each other. Women all looked like emaciated workout addicts and/or entitled professor’s wives. The whole vib just gave me the creeps. And the prices were insane. Actually,this is making me want to stop by again and just be a fly on the wall for a few minutes and observe this bizarre bunch and see if anything has changed.
I’m in Jacksonville FL, a bastion of Right-Wing gun nuts and pickup truck owners. Our Whole Foods has the EXACT SAME people. I don’t know where they are the rest of the time, but they drive from all over town to act like entitled jerks in WF. Your description of the two kinds of women are dead-on!
The second woman in the first video seemed spaced out. Maybe you need to be to pay that kind of money for food with fantasy labels.
i suspect that is the case.
whole foods doesn’t care where they make their money, ebt is still money to them. i’ve seen plenty of people using ebt at whole foods before.
so yes, i conclude there is more to the story.
Oakland needs to become retail desert.
Oakland has a lot of very rich areas. You think retailers will miss out on that?
("There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone. ")
Well, they can level off or terrace some of the mountains and build there - beyond the madness of the flatlands.
“This is why it is so hard to place and maintain a grocery store in the hood. They bleed it dry.”
Ain’t dat de truf? You know what I be sayin?
The booze being denied situation makes great sense as well.
Another detail that seems strange is that the security guard locked the door after the so-called "beatdown" so that the guy couldn't re-enter the store.
Ask yourself why would he do that?
It implies that the guard thought the "victim" was going to try and re-enter the store and wreak MORE havoc.
The guard had a gun (but didn't use it), then locked the store.
I reason that the "victim" was making all kinds of threats, and the guard didn't want any innocent customers or employees FURTHER assaulted.
Actually, that's a nice fact to know since it means that EBT users in CA feel entitled to use other people's "Whole Paycheck" (slang name for WF) for whatever organic, non-GMO, free range groceries they can get.
Side comment on WF: I have a client that's tried to place a natural lye soap product in WF but their purchasing people needed to know if the pigs that supply the lard for the product are treated nicely. Since my client doesn't raise the pigs, he declined to answer so they wouldn't take his product.
Usually seen in upscale neighborhoods.
You know you're in a rough part of town when even the Whole Foods has an armed guard.
This would be unthinkable in any of my local Seattle grocery stores.
But I DO remember armed guards in Baltimore grocery stores when I lived there.
And yes, the Greenmount KFC had bulletproof glass to slide your food through at the counter.
They did have a seating area at the time.
I always wondered how they cleaned the place.
It must have been on "lockdown" to get it done.
Live in Passaic Cnty - would not believe how many times see
people (guess ethnic background) purchase all sort of expensive foods (meats, seafood, etc )with EBT cards
We border Paterson so the scum crawl in to do their “shopping”
I THOUGHT you were gonna say:
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... WHOLE FOODS. “
"I hope that Whole Foods does reveal their fact finding with transparency
I highly doubt that will happen, since it will work in the favor of the security guard. Those missing facts would break the existing narrative.
:: Whole Foods Market “takes a zero tolerance approach to violence,” the spokesperson said ::
Well, there you go. Seems that “horrific situation” was caused by the customer making physical contact with the security guard.
Voila!
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