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Texas restaurant faces the wrath of the internet after staff get called out for humiliating Spanish-speaking teen
July 29, 2021
People in Gainesville, Texas, are outraged after a Facebook post claimed the owner of a local restaurant berated and humiliated a "teenage busboy" who doesn't speak English.
The post was made by Whitney Galubenski Vogl, who wrote that she and the group of people she was with witnessed "the worst experience we've ever had in a restaurant."
"We just witnessed the owner of Trails Inn (on Hwy 82 in Gainesville) cuss out, berate, belittle, and humiliate a teenage busboy (who was the only person cleaning tables in a packed restaurant)," Vogl wrote. "A waitress was carrying a big stack of plates out of the kitchen. She dropped them all, and blamed the bus boy for making her drop them. She yelled at him, then walked off and left all the food and plates in the floor. It happened right next to us, and it was NOT the boy's fault."
But it didn't stop there.
"Then our waitress starts yelling repeatedly at him 'Come on BOY, go clean up your mess.' Then the owner (I think he's the owner) comes over and starts yelling at the young man, in front of the whole restaurant, and he finishes by screaming at the boy that he's a 'F*CKING LOSER,'" the post continued. "Our friend spoke to the boy in Spanish asking if he's ok, if he has any family working in the restaurant with him (he doesn't), if he speaks English (he doesn't), etc."
On July 26, a post went up on the Trails Inn Facebook page saying that the restaurant "will be taking some steps this week to make it known to the community that we are on the track for the better."
"First off we will be giving the busboy of the incident ... a thousand dollars bonus check along with his regular payment for employment. We understand compensation is not enough and we have spoken personally with the busboy to work with him to better our environment," the post read, adding that the restaurant would be partaking in numerous initiatives "to show that we our behind the community 100 percent."
Angry residents have expressed their displeasure with the restaurant on their Facebook page.
"How dare you treat someone that works for you with such disrespect. I will NEVER eat at your restaurant," one person wrote on their Facebook page.
"Funny you turn off reviews? Why? Truth hurts huh! Can't wait to stop in on our way back from vacation to support that young man! That is if your restaurant is still open!" added another.
The restaurant has also faced backlash on Yelp, but the website has temporarily disabled new reviews from being posted.
"Don't eat here unless you want to support an owner who treats his employees like literal garbage," one Yelp user wrote in their review.
"Wouldn't spend a penny at this place. The owner regularly berates his employees in front of his customers. Further, certain employees are allowed to berate others too. Supporting this business supports bullying," another person said.
According to a report from News12, Trails Inn operations manager Goni Mena said there's "no excuse" for what happened.
"Nobody should be spoken to like that, especially a young gentleman just trying to get a paycheck at the end of the day," Mena said, adding that the waitress involved in the incident has been fired.
"It's not only me that apologizes, (it's) everybody in that restaurant. We have three generations of family working there....We want to help and do everything that we can to get back into the good graces with this community," Mena said.
Bibiana Rodriguez, who is a friend of the busboy's family, told News12 she is thankful for "everyone out there who had kind words to say about him."
"How they were helping him, the community has done an amazing job at that. We just want to thank everyone out there," Rodriguez said.
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Former US cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy, court documents showed Thursday, making him the most senior Roman Catholic official in America to face criminal charges in the massive clergy abuse scandal.
The 91-year-old, a former archbishop of Washington DC, was slapped with three counts of indecent assault and battery against a child over 14, according to a filing in a Massachusetts district court.
McCarrick was thrown out of the Catholic Church in 2019, becoming the highest-ranking Church figure to be expelled in modern times.
He had been found guilty by the Vatican of sexually abusing at least one teenage boy in the 1970s and of sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians.
McCarrick, who played a key role in raising funds for the Holy See from wealthy US donors, was stripped of his cardinal's title in 2018 before he lost his priest's status the following year.
A 450-page Vatican report published in 2020 concluded that McCarrick was able to rise through the ranks of the Church despite years of sexual misconduct allegations.
The Vatican admitted last November that late pope John Paul II ignored advice against promoting McCarrick over the sexual assault rumors that were later substantiated.
Prosecutors allege that McCarrick groped the victim when he was 16 in 1974 as they walked around the campus of Wellesley College in Massachusetts during his brother's wedding reception.
The victim says that McCarrick led him into a room and groped his genitals while "saying prayers," according to the criminal complaint.
The ex-cardinal has been the subject of several civil lawsuits brought by accusers but this is the first criminal case against him.
The man's lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, said his client was "showing an enormous amount of courage" by bringing the complaint.
"This is the first cardinal in the United States ever charged criminally for a sexual offense against a minor," he said in a statement to AFP.
McCarrick's attorney, Barry Coburn, told AFP he and his client "look forward to addressing the case in the courtroom."
The Catholic Church has been shaken by a string of child sex abuse scandals in recent years.
A grand jury investigation into Pennsylvania dioceses in 2018 exposed the systematic cover-up by the Church of sexual abuse by "over 300 predator priests".
More than 1,000 child victims were cited.
Between 1950 and 2016 the US Catholic Church received 18,500 complaints against 6,700 members of the clergy, according to the site bishop-accountability.org.
Several senior church members in the US have been forced to resign for protecting sex offender priests, including the late cardinal Bernard Law.
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Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined a other members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus in demanding the expulsion of Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican conference.
The pair each voted to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, and they are the only two Republicans serving on the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, which Boebert has been accused of aiding by leading Capitol tours ahead of the riot and tweeting the location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the siege.
"These members should not be allowed in our closed door private meetings or even the Republican cloakroom," Boebert said. "We had important meetings yesterday in the cloakroom. I saw Kinzinger in there. Why is he able to be part of those conversations while he goes back and confers with the opposition. Both of these politicians, Kinzinger and Cheney, have worked more with Pelosi than they have with myself, my colleagues or even [minority] leader McCarthy."
She spent a substantial portion of her remarks complaining about Kinzinger's criticism of her online and on television, and demanded him and Cheney banned from the cloakroom and expelled from the conference entirely.
"They are a cancer to our party and to our caucus and they most be expelled from our conference," Boebert said.
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