An unsettling confrontation in the Safeway parking lot
A delivery driver and a group of Analy students face off in the Safeway parking lot. It doesn't go well.
Around 8 am on Monday morning this week, a cascade of interactions between a gig-economy delivery driver and a group of teens hanging out in front of Safeway ended in a broken phone and one teen cited by the police. Basically, he hit the delivery driver’s hand, knocking her phone to the ground, while she tried to film a group of teens surrounding her in the parking lot.
Someone who knew the delivery driver posted about the incident on Nextdoor with predictable results—handwringing about “kids these days,” a litany of complaints and fears about the teens hanging out in front of Safeway, and, of course, some defenders of the teens’ right to be there.
The Sebastopol Times confirmed with Police Chief Sean McDonagh earlier this week that something had indeed gone down in the Safeway parking lot on Monday, though because it was both an open investigation and involved a juvenile, he couldn’t say much.
“We got a call at 8:24 am, yesterday, for an assault at Safeway that involved the juvenile and an adult female. There’s really not much more I can tell you other than that, but we got there three minutes later.”
He thought the word “assault” was probably overstating the matter, saying it was more like a “disturbance,” but he also said he hadn’t read the case report yet.
Here's the delivery driver’s side of the story
According to the driver, who asked to remain anonymous, the whole thing started around 8 am. She had just gotten a Safeway delivery request on her phone and drove into the Safeway parking lot.
“When I parked, I witnessed two kids harassing an elderly woman,” she said. “I wasn’t really sure what was going on. She was shaking and trying to light their cigarettes. They were, like, demanding her to light their cigarettes. Right when I got out of my car, I said, “Are you guys really harassing this woman and smoking before school?” They started cussing at me immediately.”
The driver, a woman in her mid-40s, admits that her next words were probably not the wisest. “I said, ‘You’re some punk ass bitches.’ I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I was really in shock.”
“I started filming because they were being so aggressive. And then one of them just said, ‘What are you gonna do with that?’”
The driver doesn’t recall exactly what she said. “I think I said, ‘I’m gonna put it on YouTube.’ Or, I don’t know what I said, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ Obviously, I didn’t do anything with it publicly.”
The boys walked away, and the delivery driver spoke briefly to the elderly woman. She said the woman seemed disoriented. “When I talked to her afterwards, I asked her if she was okay, and what was going on? She was just shaking and said ‘They just wanted my cigarettes and lighter.’ It was like she wasn’t all there, and then she just turned around and started cleaning part of her car. It was very strange.”
On the clock for her delivery (“I only have so much time to complete it,” she said), the driver went into Safeway and bought the groceries.
But when she emerged from the store with the groceries, “There was a mob of them waiting for me, and they started cussing at me. They were yelling things like, ‘There she is, let’s get her’ and a lot of obscenities. I had to put my groceries into the car and get my delivery done. And so that’s what I did.”
She said there was an exchange of insults as she drove out of the parking lot. She doesn’t recall what was said.
After she finished with that delivery, her phone buzzed again. She saw with a sinking feeling that it was another Safeway delivery.
“But I was like, ‘Okay, well, they’re probably in school by now, right? I’m probably okay.’ But right when I drove in, they saw me and, like, identified me. I parked and I got out of my car, and I filmed them from across the parking lot.”
That video shows two groups of teens, mostly white—one group of six girls and, a few feet away, a group of eight boys—laughing and flipping her off. Several of them yell at her that it’s illegal to film minors without their consent. (Newsflash: This is untrue under California law.)
The driver’s voice in the video is strangely touching. “Are these your kids? Are these your kids, Sebastopol?” she says with a kind of wonder. “I’m literally at work and these kids are harassing me.”
In the video, two girls break away and walk toward her.
The others followed.
“That’s when they approached me and surrounded me. I stopped recording when they came up to me. They surrounded me, calling me a pedophile, saying I was a weirdo. I wasn’t allowed to film them because they’re minors. I started to panic. There was at least 20 of them around me,” she said. (Looking at the number of kids in the video, it was probably closer to 14.)
“They were filming me and calling me all these names, saying ‘This woman is filming little kids’ and all kinds of weird stuff,” she said.
Several of them starting filming her with their phones. “There were at least eight to 10 cameras that I could see,” she said.
They peppered her with questions: Who was she? What was she doing there? Why was she filming them? What was she going to do with the video? When she tried to explain that she was at work—that’s why she was at Safeway—she said they demanded to see her employee badge.
“I knew one of them was going to attack me,” she said, “and so I got out my phone again to start recording again, and that’s when the kid knocked my phone out of my hand.”
The delivery driver, who said she has been the victim of an assault in the past, admits that she’s hyper-vigilant. She carries pepper spray. In fact, she said she had it in her pocket when the teens surrounded her. She thought about using it but, as a mother with experience with teens, said she thought that would be wrong.
“They’re just kids, right?” she said. “They’re impulsive.”
The action of knocking the phone out of her hand—that small act of violence—seemed to break the spell, she said. Suddenly, the kids scattered and began walking away toward Analy.
The delivery driver called the Sebastopol Police then followed the boy who knocked the phone out of her hand up the street, still filming. She said one of the girls who’d been a part of the group kept trying to make her stop. “The girl who first approached me was stepping on my feet and like kicking the back of my legs, like she was trying to get me to stop following him.”
When asked if she had any bruises on her legs or feet as a result of this, she said she did not.
When the police arrived, the delivery driver identified the boy, who was then cited. She was a little surprised that the police showed no interest in apprehending the other teens who had been involved. She said, “It was a complete mob mentality. It was like Lord of the Flies.”
Her hand was red and her wrist was slightly swollen, but she ran several more deliveries that day. By midday, however, she felt very ill and her mother took her to the emergency room in Petaluma, where she presented with extremely high blood pressure and a swollen wrist, which the doctor recommended she keep wrapped and advised that she take Advil for the pain.
What the teens thought was happening
Others, of course, see the altercation differently. One of the teens’ parents wrote to the Sebastopol Times in response to a call I put out on Nextdoor. She wrote “My son was sadly involved and felt very threatened by the woman. She had multiple times to walk away and be the adult. Also, no one likes being filmed, young or old.”
She also noted that, “There are a few kids who give the whole group a bad name, but a majority of them are very nice, respectful kids.” And in fact, in the brief video taken before the phone got slapped out of her hand, some of them do look like nice kids. Filming her back, some are smiling but others look worried and almost frightened.
She said she’d ask her son if he’d be willing to talk with me, but I never heard back from him.
This mother knows that hanging out in front of Safeway isn’t ideal. She brought up “the topic of the teen center or needing a place for kids to go hangout, which isn’t a bad idea. In Rohnert Park, Rancho kids have a place off campus that’s really neat, with pool tables and food and whatnot. It’s very accommodating and used by the kids at Rancho. They even have an ice cream shop attached, and all proceeds go back into the teens. Sebastopol needs something like this.”
On Thursday, I went down to Safeway after school to see if I could get the story from the teens themselves. I recognized several of the boys from the video and went up to talk to them. Admittedly, interviewing a gaggle of teenage boys as a group isn’t ideal.
All of them wanted to remain anonymous.
When asked what happened on Monday, one said, “A lady was recording, and then she kept on talking about—like I don’t even know—some bullshit.”
He said the delivery driver threatened the group by saying she was going to have her friends jump them. The delivery driver denies this.
“We didn’t know why she was filming, like, a bunch of kids,” another said.
Basically, they said they were creeped out that an adult was filming them.
I asked about what the delivery driver said started the whole thing—the harassment of the old woman involving cigarettes. They flatly denied that that had happened. Several said there was no old woman in the parking lot at all. One said, “Well, there was…” and the others looked at him as if to say, “Shut the fuck up.”
I told them that there was actually a photo of the old woman with one of them standing right next to her.
They returned to their recurrent theme that no one should be filming minors in public. I asked if anyone had anything else to add, and one of them said “Don’t film minors and maybe you won’t get your shit slapped.”
What can be done
We reached out to Analy principal Chuck Wade to get his take on this situation. He said he knew about the incident and the police investigation but noted that it had happened outside of school hours.
“As you may know, I can’t share student discipline decisions, which I know can be frustrating,” he wrote. “We are careful to follow all district policies and Education Code requirements in responding to student behavior, however, and we continue to reinforce expectations for safety and respectful conduct in the community—before, during, and after school.”
Asked about the school’s policy regarding the behavior of Analy students at Safeway, he wrote, “We do not have a specific policy around Safeway, but we have changed some of our practices this year. In particular, one of our vice principals is frequently there after school to help ensure that students are safe on their way home.”
Safeway manager Andy Marsh was out of town at a meeting in Ukiah when this incident took place. I asked him about the store’s policy toward the sometimes-large number of teens that congregate in front of the store.
“It’s still kind of an ongoing issue we try to combat as best we can,” he said. “We just ask that they don’t loiter outside of the store. It’s a constant struggle…Our store is usually kind of a pickup and drop-off point for the school, which is, I guess, kind of frustrating for everybody, but we do what we can.”
He noted that the store is working with the Analy administration and the local police. He said the school often sends campus supervisors to the store during the lunch hour to send students back to campus—Analy is technically a closed campus—and that the police are also very supportive. “They basically said anytime we need to reach out, they’ll be happy to respond and assist in any way that they can.”
On the other hand, Marsh said the teens are also his customers. “It does bring business into the store. I mean, kids come in, they buy breakfast, they buy some coffee at Starbucks and then go to school. But again, it’s a balancing act. I just want to make sure we have a safe space for my customers coming in and out of the store and that everyone feels welcome,” he said.
Former Mayor Una Glass noted that the problem of teens in front of Safeway goes back more than 20 years—and that the teen center on Morris Street was actually built in response to this same issue.
On Friday, I went back to the police station. Sargeant Salvador Villanueva said the investigation into this incident had been closed and turned over to juvenile probation.
As for the delivery driver? For now, she says will no longer be working in Sebastopol—certainly not at the Sebastopol Safeway—because she’s afraid.
“I am working in Santa Rosa from now on,” she said. “I am afraid to go to many places in Sebastopol now. It’s already impacted by job.”
Safeway should have security cameras installed. I find the delivery driver more credible but not having been there I cannot pass judgement on these students. Anyone who goes to this Safeway has seen the gatherings. None have ever threatened me, but I am a 6’1 and, as a man, may be less likely to be harassed.
They may be “kids” to some people, like the parent quoted in the article suggests, but they are fully capable of inflicting harm. It seems likely that most of these students were so-called “good” kids that were intimidated by one or more of the so-called “bad” ones into not being totally honest about what transpired. We all knew about this in high school, didn’t we? It’s nothing new.
I'm no fan of Safeway but this is not really about Safeway's (many) shortcomings. And this is not about not having a 'teen center'. This is about out of control kids who have no respect for adults and think they can get away with theft and intimidation. Maybe if we start fining and otherwise holding their parents accountable, it'll put the onus of them to do a better parenting job. Coming on the heels of Dale Dougherty's excellent piece on academic underachievement in SoCo, it's clear there is a big problem with a lot of 'our' kids, who will have a rude awakening when they hit the competitive work world....without literacy, numeracy, manners, and good judgement.