A car repair shop in Wilson is under fire over comments an employee made about Juneteenth.
The viral surveillance footage taken Wednesday at Synergy Auto Care captured the exchange.
It shows an employee responding to a customer’s apparent sarcastic remarks about the holiday.
“Why are the banks closed tomorrow?” one customer in the waiting area asked.
“Juneteenth, a new holiday they added a few years ago,” replied an employee.
“Okie Dokie, then,” replies the customer.
Another employee can be heard laughing and replied, “I know right.”
A second customer is then seen immediately, standing up, asking for her truck back and walking out of the shop.
“Give me my [expletive] truck. Pull my truck around. Give me, give me my truck,” the customer said.
Synergy Auto Care owner Josh Dougherty posted the footage and an explanation on Synergy’s Facebook page. The video and profile were quickly removed after the post received swift backlash.
“It was overflowed and flooded. It was just nothing but hate, so yes, I took the post down immediately, unshared it from social media and shut the page down,” Dougherty said.
The shop has received comments expressing outrage over the incident. Dougherty said two employees who weren’t involved have left the shop after receiving death threats.
The owner says his employee at the center of the controversy did not understand the full context and history of Juneteenth, which is a holiday on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas, with the news that the Civil War had ended and slaves were now free.
“She was thinking the holiday had a whole other meaning,” Dougherty said. “She was believing it had to something with school letting out, teenagers, where the ‘teenth’ came from, and she was believing it didn’t need to be a day, a serious day per se.”
WRAL News made several attempts to contact the woman seen leaving the auto shop. Her relatives said she was unavailable for an interview.
A video on the customer’s social media account appearing to explain what happened has since been deleted.
Several accounts on social media have commented support for the woman.
“Thank you for standing up for us at that shop love,” said one commenter.
“You did the right thing,” said another.
Dougherty says he’s taken steps to educate the employee and the rest of his staff about potentially sensitive holidays.
“She doesn’t really have a platform to say how much she apologizes for it,” Dougherty said. “She tells me everyday she wishes it didn’t go down that way. She didn’t know. She wishes she would’ve known what she knows now.”
The owner tells WRAL News no one has been fired since the incident and that the woman who walked out has been a customer at the shop in the past.
Check out was real simple, can't wait for the tote bag