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Burger King Prank Call In Minnesota — Anti-Gay Hate Crime In Miami Beach Burger King?

By Stephen Jordan
Published on: 07:43 PST, Apr 9, 2016

Employees of a Burger King in Minnesota were allegedly the victims of a prank phone call, it seemed.

ABC News reported that a prank caller called a particular Burger King in the suburb of Coon Rapids on Friday night. Employees answered and the prank caller told them it was the fire department calling, alerting them that the restaurant could soon explode if they didn’t act fast. The manager fell for the prank, as well, as they were told that in order to relieve pressure inside the restaurant, they were going to have to smash the windows. And they did exactly that.

“Officers arrived and found that the manager and employees of the Burger King were smashing out the windows,” according to Sgt. Rick Boone. “The manager explained they’d received a phone call from a male who identified himself as a fireman who said there were dangerous levels of gas in the building and they had to break out all the windows to keep the building from blowing up.”

The incident of the Burger King’s windows being smashed was caught on video and published via YouTube. The employees and manager went outside of the restaurant and began kicking in and smashing the windows, as a lone witness recorded from a distance across the street. Another man can be seen exiting his vehicle, phone in hand, recording the incident as well.

A Burger King in Shawnee, Oklahoma, received a very similar call the night prior, according to KFOR-TV. Those employees were told that there were high levels of carbon monoxide in the restaurant and that the windows needed to be broken. The cost was nearly $10,000 in damages. In February of 2016, a third Burger King in Morro Bay, California, received a call being told that their windows needed to be smashed in order to prevent some kind of catastrophe and resulting in $35,000 in damages.

It is possible the calls are connected, considering they were all Burger King locations. However, authorities are currently in the middle of an investigation and are looking into the prank call at the Burger King in Coon Rapids.

Another Burger King in Miami Beach is also making headlines, but not for the same reasons.

Jordan Schaeffer, 25, was kissing his boyfriend Erik Danko while they were in line for the Burger King Whopper Bar. Video surveillance footage was able to capture a man wearing a dark shirt and shorts approaching Schaeffer, shoving him onto the ground, using his legs to put Schaeffer in a headlock and continuously punching him. Bystanders who were present while this was going by stood and watched, doing nothing, with a few quietly laughing or walking in the other direction.

When Danko tried to pull the man off of Schaeffer, a second man, wearing a long-sleeve shirt and jeans, intervened and stopped him. Witnesses claimed there were anti-gay slurs being shouted as Schaeffer was being physically attacked.

Miami Beach police officer Ernesto Rodriquez told CBS News, “the subjects in this case happen to be gay individuals, and that’s part of our investigation to see what provoked the attack.”

While Schaeffer publicly stated that the attack was a hate crime, other witnesses claimed that Schaeffer was the one who instigated the incident. On man in particular, who wanted to remain anonymous, gave his testimony on Facebook.

“Some friends and I witnessed this incident and the story being told by [Schaeffer] is completely inaccurate. As we saw it, he is mainly responsible for the fight and the altercation had nothing to do with his sexual identity. I’ve already contacted Miami police to offer my perspective, if they want it.”

Joey Cooke from Nashville, Tennessee, said that Danko and Schaeffer had been arguing that night, agreeing that Schaeffer was being overly aggressive. He even claimed that Jordan Schaeffer never actually kissed his boyfriend.

“He was fighting with his boyfriend the entire night,” Cooke claims. “They were in the bathroom at Burger King and when Jordan came out, he started crap with someone else and talking about fighting. When the other guy got involved, Jordan continued to talk shit and threatened to fight him. He approached the guy to fight him and it didn’t end up in his favor.”

According to Cooke, Jordan Schaeffer works as an escort in LA, under the name Jason Strick, and was allegedly attempting to make his boyfriend Erik Danko jealous. Schaeffer and Danko may be charged with filing a false police report if they have lied to authorities about what happened that night at Burger King.

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]

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