Chipotle(NEW YORK) — Fast-food giant Chipotle said it’s having second thoughts about firing the manager of one of its Minnesota franchises who was recorded in a series of viral cellphone videos refusing to serve a group of young black men unless they paid first.
The Mexican restaurant chain said in a statement that it was aware that one of the alleged victims who claimed that he and his friends were racially profiled had previously boasted on Twitter about dine-and-dash incidents specifically targeting Chipotle.
“We now have additional information which needs to be investigated further. We want to do the right thing, so after further investigation, we will retain and rehire if the facts warrant it,” Chipotle said in a statement on Sunday.
The incident occurred on Thursday at a Chipotle on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, when five young black men walked in about 4 p.m. and asked to be served.
In a video posted on Twitter Friday by one of the men, Masud Ali, 21, which garnered tens of thousands of likes and retweets, an unidentified female manager tells the group, “You gotta pay because you never have money when you come here.”
The group begins yelling at the manager and other staffers that they were being “stereotyped.” They continued to berate the manager and a staffer who asked them to calm down when a white customer who came in after them was served without being asked to pay up front.
“We’re not going to make food unless you guys actually have money,” a server said in the video.
After the video went viral on Twitter, Chipotle announced on Saturday that it had fired the manager and made the staff of the restaurant undergo “re-training to prevent this incident from happening again.”
Other Twitter users came the manager’s defense, alerting Chipotle of the previous tweets allegedly posted by Ali in which he joked about dime-and-dash incidents at St. Paul restaurants, including Chipotle.
“Not dine and dash we’re just borrowing the food for a couple of hours that’s all,” Ali allegedly quipped in one Tweet from July 2015.
In another tweet in March 2015, he allegedly wrote, “Dine and dash is forever interesting” and added three emojis of laughing and crying faces.
In January 2016, Ali tweeted: “aye man I think Chipotle catching up to us fam … should we change locations…”
The tweets have since been taken down, but Twitter users defending the manager posted screen grabs of them over the weekend.
Efforts by ABC News to reach Ali for comment Monday were unsuccessful.
“Our actions were based on the facts known to us immediately after the incident, including video footage, social media posts and conversations with the customer, manager, and our employees,” Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief communications officer, said in an email to the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper.
Schalow said the company was aware of Ali’s previous tweets before it fired the manager, but claimed “additional information” has prompted the company to investigate further and consider rehiring the manager. She declined to elaborate on the additional information the company received.
A petition titled “Help Chipotle Manager Get Job Back” was launched on the website UnitedStand.org with the goal of getting 10,000 signatures. As of Monday afternoon, 71 people had signed the petition.
The fired manager, who goes by the Instagram handle dOmMarie, replied to the petition, writing on Instagram, “Can’t thank you enough for the kind words, positive vibes, prayers and warm thoughts.”
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