This file photo from the New York Daily News, taken in January 2014, shows Korean American seniors involved in an earlier dispute with a Queens McDonald’s.
A Korean American senior citizen in New York has filed a $10 million dollar lawsuit against McDonald’s accusing one of its workers of racially attacking him verbally and physically, Yonhap reported today.
The 62-year-old, only identified by his last name Kim, alleges that on the afternoon of Feb. 16, a female manager at a Flushing, Queens McDonald’s hit Kim with a broom after he complained to another restaurant worker that he had waited 10 minutes to purchase a cup of coffee.
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Before being struck by the broom, Kim alleges that the manager, only identified by her first name Lucy, first yelled at him to leave the restaurant, after he made the complaint, and told him that coffee is not available to “people like you,” according to the Yonhap story. When he tried to record the incident with his cell phone camera, the manager struck him with the broom, the lawsuit says.
The manager was later indicted on assault charges, the article said.
“Kim was not able to work for a while due to the injuries, and he has been suffering from severe mental pain caused by the ill treatment and the subsequent humiliation,” Kim’s lawyer Moon-kyung Bae told Yonhap.
“It constitutes a racially motivated hate crime, as Kim was the only Asian there at that time,” Bae said, noting that this lawsuit is meant “to prevent a recurrence of such a case against ethnic minorities.”
The case carries echoes of past problems between Korean American seniors and a Queens McDonald’s, where just this past January, restaurant employees called the police to get the elderly customers to leave after spending several hours drinking coffee there, in violation of the establishment’s 20-minute seating time limit. The Korean American seniors, joined by some community groups, protested and called for a boycott of McDonald’s. The two sides, however, were able to reach acompromise, with the seniors agreeing to give up their seats during busy periods, and management promising to ease the time limit during off-peak hours.
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