Article by: Emma Clayfield
Social media streets have gone ablaze in outrage over a video that went viral displaying a Food Lovers Market customer bleeding to death after being attacked by an employee with a mug.
Calls for the employee to be fired and placed under arrest have been made by those who found the footage disturbing and of a gruesome manner.
UpdateSA reported over the weekend that an attack took place at a Food Lovers Market “Morning Glen” in Gallo Manor, Sandton, where an employee slashed open the face of a customer with a mug.
After more than 24 hours of the reports being made and several failed attempts to contact the Food-chains head office for comment, the official Twitter account of Food Lovers Market responded to our article by way of a direct message.
In response to our article the official social media account said the following:
“Hi Emma Clayfield and the Update team, we are aware of the incident at our store in Gallo Manor and have secured CCTV footage. Note, the supervisor was not the aggressor. The matter is with @SAPoliceService, we ask the public not to get involved. Full Statement: http://bit.ly/3qlnAdu”
The direct message was accompanied by an official statement from the Food-chain. The statement however does not address the injuries sustained by the customer, nor does it stipulate which procedures were followed.
The message by the store tells us that the Food-Chain has taken a firm stance that the customer was the aggressor and therefore they will be protecting the employees actions. This stance sets a tone and gives off the impression that they promote consumer/employee violence.
A response such as the one provided may be perceived as the food-chain having taken the law into the their own hands by setting a public judgement based on their views of what transpired in the CCTV footage leaving no room for the law to take its course, where the courts can professionally scrutinise the footage.
The statement goes on to confirm that the matter is with the South African Police Services, however no official case number was provided on the statement.
The statement provided did not provide any contact details nor does it detail who the statement was written by or how they can be reached for further questions in this matter.
The UpdateSA team is still not privy to whether the Food-chain has made efforts to contact the injured customer, who is still under medical care.
It has been disclosed to the UpdateSA team that a case of attempted murder has been opened by the injured customer against the perpetrator and the store.
We have also been made aware that this was the not the first violent incident in the same store in less than 5 days, where an employee violently attacked a customer.
This is a developing story…refresh feed for updates.
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