"I need somebody to come through here please, ASAP. Now. There's about eight people in a van, and they've been in the store for about an hour. They keep going back and forth to the bathrooms by my back door." That’s the 911 call—obtained by WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News—from a Subway employee on a family of 6, Felicia and Othniel Dobson and their four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 19. The family had stopped at the Subway in Coweta County, Georgia, on their trip back from South Georgia to their home state of North Carolina. They had been attending a grandparent’s birthday party for the weekend.
The Dobsons
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A Newnan police officer showed up. The Dobsons said the officer apologized and told them the employee had said she was suspicious of the family and that she has been robbed before and thought they would rob her.
The Dobson family told the Channel 2 Action news that their 19-year-old is going to college this year, the kids are upstanding young folk, and there had been nothing to indicate there was an issue. Subway headquarters says they are “investigating,” and the owner of this particular franchise called the family to apologize and say the woman had been put on “administrative leave.”
I reached out to Felicia Dobson and she sent this statement from the family.
It can be dangerous to make a call to law enforcement with blatantly false information for people of color. The employee's voice was quivering as she described my family as non-customers, more women than men, and hanging around a back door eventually describing us as being suspicious and possibly going to rob her to an officer. This call came after we purchased several footlong subs and one addition while she took a smoke break outside of the store. We have no words for her action. Our kids were stunned to see their parents speaking with an officer following what they thought was a normal dinner followed by using a single stall bathroom one at a time. Our hope is that this one day stops happening to people in this country. Discrimination is never ok. We pray that love will prevail.
A white man called the cops on a black family in North Carolina Wednesday for using a neighborhood pool because he apparently didn't believe she was rich enough to live there. In the latest of a string of incidents of white people calling cops on people of color for increasingly absurd reasons—this week an Oregon African-American lawmaker was reported for canvassing for votes—a man dubbed #IDAdam on social media demanded to see ID proving she was allowed to use the pool. “This is a classic case of racial profiling in my half a million $$ neighborhood pool,” wrote Jasmine Edwards. “This happened to me and my baby today,” she said, in reference to her encounter with police, which was captured on cell phone video. The Winston-Salem Journal has identified the man as Adam Bloom. Police officers are on the scene as the video begins. One of the officers tells the man that if Edwards “has a card to get in the pool I believe that that should be enough.” The woman later hands over her electronic key card to the officer, who demonstrates that it opens the gate. “Alright ma'am,” the officer tells the woman. “I apologize for the time and the altercation that occurred.”