Employee Charged In Taco Bell BB Shooting in Massachusetts
Taco Bell has gained a reputation for its late-night service. Its advertisements suggest you can order at 1 a.m. or later. Many of its drive-thrus are open 24/7. It has become a cultural icon for gamers, stoners, and students. Taco Bell is the place to go after leaving the bar in many college towns.
This popularity also opens the fast food giant to the craziness of late-night customers, too.
The latest incident shows how seriously some people take their tacos.
An employee at the Liberty Street restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was arrested on July 13, and faces arraignment today on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after attacking a Taco Bell customer who couldn’t wait to be served.
4 a.m. on a Sunday morning is apparently not the time to play around when it comes to food. The hungry Taco Bell patron tried to place his order but, as the victim claimed, he’d been waiting “for a very long time” and after failing to get a response at the drive-thru window, approached the locked door to complain about the poor customer service.
He used his fists to beat on the door and, when an employee came to stop him, the two argued. Steven Noska, 26, pushed the customer out of the fast food restaurant. The struggle left Noska with bite marks on his arm and angrier than the taco-starved man. The employee then went to his car and returned with a BB pistol which he used to first shoot and then whip the customer several times.
The Boston Herald writes that Noska was arrested on two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and one count of assault and battery.
The Springfield Police Department’s Facebook page reported that when Officers William LaPorte, Angel Marrero, and Anthony Tyler responded to a hold-up alarm from the restaurant, they found the 26-year-old victim beating on the door of Taco Bell, undeterred by the assault and still determined to buy tacos.
Several witnesses filmed the attack on their cell phones and came forward to show the investigating officers, who then arrested Steven Noska and confiscated his BB gun.
This isn’t a random thing for Taco Bell. It happens.
Previously, The Inquisitr reported on the murder of an Aurora, Colorado man which involved an illegal marijuana sale gone wrong. Three teens arranged to meet Mark Chalfant in the parking lot of a Taco Bell around midnight on June 4th, where the buyers planned to rob the dealer. The robbery went bad and Chalfant was shot. He died en route to the hospital and all three teens are being held without bail on first-degree murder charges and several felony counts.
In February, Taco Bell employees in Bartlesville, Oklahoma were involved in an incident which left one worker in the hospital with stab wounds and a police officer hospitalized after suffering a heart attack during the struggle to subdue the suspect, also an employee at the Green County Road restaurant.
The altercation started when Benjamin Levi Walton, 29, stabbed a 49-year-old co-worker in the front seat of a Taco Bell work truck while the two were having lunch. Other employees called the police and when they arrived, Walton was still behaving so violently that he was tasered several times. This had no effect and when the suspect rushed a policeman in an attempt to unholster his service weapon, it took several more to subdue him, after which an officer had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital and admitted to intensive care.
Attacks on Taco Bell employees and customers and other cases of general mayhem and oddness at the popular fast food restaurant have become frequent enough to warrant a “Taco Bell Crime of the Week” column in the OC Register.
It remains unreported whether the unnamed Springfield customer got his tacos or not.
[Image courtesy of wikipedia]
