Good Guy with a Gun #237: Baton Rouge, LA
Bad food. Worse response. But the parents were outstanding. | Original incident: June 30, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is essentially the same as the calendar version.
Food service is an honorable profession, even in fast food — but boy, some people really treat food service workers like trash.
Imagine yourself behind a KFC/Taco Bell counter on a Thursday afternoon in Baton Rouge. A young man, around twenty-five years old, comes in, and he’s pretty upset. He says that he had placed an order about three hours earlier, and when he received it, it had a hair in it.
You probably have the same reaction everyone does: If true, that’s really gross. And because you’re working at the store, you’re mortified.
You try to make it right. Replacement food? Refund?
No dice. The guy demands to see the man who made the food.
That man is a woman, as it turns out. (Aside: How did they know she, specifically, was the one who had made his food three hours earlier? I wonder if they were just trying to get him settled down, and she was the sacrificial lamb.)
The customer begins to berate her.
Enough, you think. You intervene, verbally: Time for this to end.
The man says, “I’ll be outside for y’all!” and leaves.
And he is. There’s a school parking lot behind the Taco Bell, and his car is in it.
The good thing is, there’s a friend coming to pick up your co-worker. When he pulls up, she gets into his car and you get into yours.1 Then that customer with the hairy food and the foul mouth pulls into the parking lot and gets out of his car while holding a gun.
The friend yells at him. The customer fires his gun at the three of you. The friend fires his gun at the customer.
Resistance encountered! The customer drives away.
Not the best day of work you’ve ever had.
Here’s the kicker: About two hours later, the man — whom we now know is Loney Taylor — was brought back to the Taco Bell by his parents. The friend’s bullet had grazed Taylor, and apparently his parents figured out what had happened and insisted that their adult son take responsibility for his actions.
They even made him turn himself in to police.
The gun-toting friend had better aim than Taylor: The employees were unharmed.
Taylor was charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated criminal damage to property, and one count of illegal use of weapons.
He should have taken the L and the refund.
Sources
I’ve only got one source for this story: Louisiana First News.
This part is true in spirit to what happened — it sounds like the woman who got berated and the man who intervened were both waiting for the third party to show up and give one of them a ride — but I don’t know for sure whether it was the man or woman who got the ride vs. getting into his/her own car.
Good for those parents. Some people still need to grow up.