CONTENT WARNING: Abuse, Violence, Tense/Frightening Situation
I used to work for one of the major fast food empires. Our store was in a very rough area, and we had a lot of issues with problem customers. This was just about tempered by the largest police station in the region being about a ninety-second drive away.
In spite of our protests, our franchise owner declared that we would go twenty-four-seven with two staff working between 1:00 and 6:00 am in the store and the drive-thru. He didn’t care that even during the day when we were properly staffed, I — a shift manager — had been attacked by a customer swinging a chair at me, or that our assistant store manager had been robbed with a machete at her throat late in the evening. After all members of management threatened to not work, he finally agreed that we would be drive-thru-only between 11:00 pm and 6:00 am. That was just about accepted as a compromise since our drive-thru windows had shields on them to prevent people from climbing through.
For a couple of months, it worked about as well as could be expected — quiet with occasional morons. Then, one Tuesday, night, I — 5’6″ male, average build — was the shift manager and my only and lonely coworker was another guy of slimmer build but 5’10”.
The night started normally enough, quiet as Tuesdays tended to be. The evening staff clocked out at 12:00 and the evening manager left at 1:00.
Just before 3:00, I was out in the lobby doing some detail cleaning when I noticed a young woman running across the carpark. I went to the door to deliver the standard “drive-thru only” message, but my words died in my throat once she came close to the door.
She was of Middle Eastern heritage, young, and pretty short, but even with her skin tone and the poor light I could see that she’d been severely beaten; her face was bruised and swollen so badly that her left eye was sealed shut and the way she was carrying her right arm suggested it might be broken. There was terror in her one working eye as she begged me to let her in. I told her I needed to grab the keys to open the door and I’d be thirty seconds. As I was leaving the office to get back to the door, she started hammering on the window and screamed, “He’s found me!”
A black BMW had pulled into the yard at speed. I sprinted to the door as its occupants — four males of the same ethnicity as the woman at the door — got out and approached her at a run. I got the door open, got her inside, and locked the door again about two seconds before the first man made it to the door. He looked at me and the woman with a mix of disgust and hate and then started screaming at me to open the door. I shouted to my coworker to get the police down with urgency and moved away from the windows with the woman who was pretty much hysterical with fear at this point.
The man outside pulled out a phone and started speaking rapidly in Arabic whilst beating on the glass. My coworker rang the police and explained what was going on, and they said a response unit was on its way.
Five minutes later, the police hadn’t turned up, but a further five cars pulled in, and from them came another twenty-plus men, some of whom were carrying improvised weaponry in the form of hammers. I figured out what was about to happen and got myself, my coworker, and the woman into the back area to put code-locked fire doors between us and the mob outside. We got behind closed doors just before we heard one of the lobby windows shatter.
Fortunately, or so we thought, that was when we heard a police siren. However, the siren came close to the store and then moved off. At this point, members of the group outside had reached the fire doors and were very aggressively hitting them.
Not knowing what had happened with the police or how long the door would hold, I decided our only option was to get on the roof and bank on the combined weight of my coworker and me being enough to prevent them from lifting the hatch again once we got up there and closed it. The woman’s right arm was too injured to grip with, so she managed with three limbs and I used my shoulder to support her as I climbed behind her with my coworker bringing up the rear.
We got onto the roof and sealed the hatch behind us. At this point, we heard sirens again, and thirty seconds later, a swarm of police vehicles entered the carpark. I shouted down to the officers exiting the cars what the situation was and they moved as a group into the building. At the same time, I heard the fire door give way, and a few seconds later, the hatch started to shake as someone tried to force it open.
The sounds coming from below made it quite clear that the attacking group didn’t intend to come quietly as what sounded like an all-out melee started. From the roof, we couldn’t see anything that was happening, but when a pair of riot vans pulled in a few minutes later, we realised the police had called for more backup. Even with their reinforcements, it was a further ten minutes before the banging at the hatch ceased, and after another couple of minutes, we had a knock on the hatch and an officer asking us to open the hatch.
I met an officer halfway up the ladder who confirmed that all members of the group had been detained. I explained that the woman was injured and would struggle to get down on her own, so the police helped her down and my coworker and I followed.
The store was pretty much a ruin. The group had used anything not bolted down to fight the police, a further three windows had been smashed in the fighting, and half of our lobby chairs were damaged beyond use, amongst other issues.
By the time members of the group had been taken away, statements had been taken, and the woman had thanked my coworker and me and left in an ambulance flanked by two police officers, the morning shift was arriving. My store manager and franchise owner arrived about twenty minutes later. The police explained that the first sirens I’d heard had belonged to a lone patrol vehicle with a single female officer in it; she realised she was in serious danger of becoming a statistic if she attempted anything on her own and so pulled away whilst calling for backup.
My store manager was very concerned for us, but our owner just looked around and said very matter-of-factly that we should be back open by the weekend. He never asked if my coworker and I were okay. I told him that all the management had warned him about the risks of opening at night and he had ignored us. He responded that business was business, and at that, I threw my badge at his feet and told him I quit; my coworker did the same seconds later.
I never met the woman I helped that night again, but I did receive a letter from her forwarded to me from the police. She explained that her family had been trying to force her into an arranged marriage and were angry at her for resisting. Anger turned to violence when they discovered that she was already in a relationship, and they had confined her to her house and inflicted the injuries on her I saw that night. The man who pounded on the door was her older brother, sent by her father as an enforcer to bring her back when she escaped. All the other men who showed up were various relations to her — brothers, cousins, uncles, etc. She herself was going into witness protection somewhere else in the country.
I gave evidence in court several months later. The eventual outcome was that seventeen members of her family received sentences of varying lengths, with her brother and father receiving sentences approaching ten years each.
