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."
Probably.
6:00am. Good time to do your shopping. Most of the troublemakers are still sleeping off their Thunderbird.
about your side comment, that sounds like an episode of portlandia...
a pair of diners wants to know everything about the organic chicken they’re about eat, and went to see the farm it was raise at. I guess people similar to that do exist in real life.
Two things:
(1) Oakland is in transition from being a rough ghetto town to a bohemian/yuppie town.
Just as Brooklyn experienced an invasion of young white and Asian artists and developers when Manhattan rents got too high for entry level New Yorkers, Oakland is now Brooklyn for entry level San Franciscans.
So Whole Foods wants to get established in the area before it goes all white, to get a headstart.
(2) Zoe Marks' Twitter feed shows - in pictures and in words - what a self-righteous, self-important SJW she is. She couldn't be happier than if she hit the lottery.
It is another slap at the 2nd Amendment. A subtle way to associate guns and “violence”. “Armed Police” “unarmed teen” is another.
I really miss my old Shoprite. There is a Wegman’s out here about 40 minutes away from me in western NY state... but they are high. Everything out here is high. I really miss my old Shoprite. I don’t miss Newark, though.
WF wouldn't have much of a bottom-line without them, I guess. A Tulsa-area grocery chain has decided to appeal to that type with a line of chicken products. The ads use those stereotypes for the actors and I find it hilarious. I guess it requires a twisted mind to realize how much they are actually spoofing the granola-crunching, Earth shoe crowd.
Much better, I( was shooting from the lip on the fly.
Years ago I was in a Barnes & Noble in some slum in one of the outer boroughs in NYC; I was shocked to see an armed guard there (after overcoming the shock that there was a Barnes & Noble there). Newark had its first TD Bank branch open a few years back, and didn’t want to appear unwelcoming so they wouldn’t use the zoo barricades to protect the tellers. It was robbed in short order...
One of our Shop-Rite employees admitted many of their shoppers were “first of the month” people; they stand out because they have TWO shopping carts loaded with pricey food...
I’ve done it for years, and never had a problem. The black workers have been there as long as the white workers (they all do a good job), and the black shoppers at that time are hard-working people like the rest of us. I’ve made it clear to my wife that I will never go there (or to our Wal-Mart) after 8 am (though I may have to modify that with our Wal-Mart no longer being open 24 hours).
Our Shop-Rite had a Pathmark about a quarter of a mile away; I liked that better because it had less Newark shoppers (they bus them in) and more variety (for slightly higher prices). I believe Wal-Mart, which is much cheaper on groceries (for the same brands) will eventually put the local supermarkets out of business. The only chance the smaller ones have is that people just refuse to go to Wal-Mart because the refuse that shops there (it is very Third World)...
Yes, the problem really isn’t Whole Foods...which actually has pretty good stuff and pleasant staff, and, btw, did resist Obamacare...but some of the customers. Such as Zoe.
http://wappp.hks.harvard.edu/people/zoe-marks
As I expected.
Rachel Dolezal?
Being employed as a security guard or police officer, for that matter, does not give you a license to physically abuse people, or take out out your frustration on people. Then again, the trash needs to be taken out from time to time.
More like an entitled, spoiled, child of millionaires, never got her hands dirty WASSSP fellow.
But she dated a black man in college and sexually experimented with lesbians until graduation, so she's got all of the right credentials for some kind of worthless position in the "real world".
Just don't ask her to actually produce something of tangible value in her life.
LOL!
Are you Chris Rock?
He'd say something like that. That I won't repeat.
But is true.
Any perps that would steal from a bookstore will automatically be described as having a distinct lack of melanin.
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