Viral videos are circulating into a storm of speculation about what happened in a Minnesota McDonalds on Monday night, a situation that escalated to the point where a man pulled a gun on a group of high school students.
A group of friends, mostly Somali, were at the library studying when they got hungry and went down the street to McDonalds, where they ordered and tried to pay with the Apple Pay app on their phones. The transactions weren't working and apparently, a guy behind them got annoyed by the holdup and expressed his discontent. Jihan Abdullahi and Amal Mohammed then left the line and tried to figure out what was going on with their phones or if there was another way to pay, when the guy in the camo hood made a comment about them paying with the EBT app. Mohammed says that "Jihan said, 'Just because I'm black does not mean I use EBT.' Basically after that, he was trying to say, 'You do use EBT,' and Jihan was saying, 'No I don’t,' and telling him to stop being racist."
The situation escalated to the point where the two had to call over their other friends and the guy was yelling at them and telling them to shut up (note the footwear):
The situation got to the point where he felt justified in pulling a gun on the students, laughing and walking outside. When the group of friends ran away towards the back of the McDonalds to hide from the armed, angry man, an employee of the McDonalds yelled at them to "get the fuck out of my store" and, in response to worries that there was an armed and unstable-looking guy outside, said: "I don't give a fuck." Another employee said that he pulled out a gun "for a reason."
The police are investigating the whole event and the owner of the McDonalds, Paul Ostergaard said that "nothing is more important than the safety and security of our customers and employees." Uh-huh. One other man in the store protested the employee's idea of kicking the kids out and, according to Farida Osman (who uploaded the videos) he saved their skins: "I’m so thankful that one man was there. I feel like if he wasn’t there, we would have had to leave; they would’ve called the cops on us."
[via]