Skin cancer survivor told to leave store because of his disfigured face: 'We're human beings'
Kirby Evans is a skin cancer survivor, who lost his nose and his left eye to the disease. But the South Carolina man hadn’t felt pain quite like the pain of discrimination when he was judged for his disfigured face.
Evans was looking for a quick bite to eat when he stopped at a gas station in Walterboro, S.C., called the Forks Pit Stop on Monday and bought a pack of doughnuts and a drink. Apparently his money was good enough for the cashier to take, but he wasn’t welcome to stay. He tells WCIV in Charleston, S.C., that the manager, Donna Crosby, quickly came up to him and grabbed him by the arm.
“Next thing I knew, she jerked me into her office,” Evans said. “The words that came out of her mouth hurt me so deep.”
Crosby proceeded to tell the man that he was scaring customers. She gave him an ultimatum to either cover his face or leave.
“How can a person eat anything with his face covered?” Evans asked rhetorically.
His daughter, Brandy, took to Facebook to share the upsetting story with friends. In just a few days, the post has been shared by thousands.
“My father is the strongest man I know but, as he told me what happened to him, I watched tears roll out of his eye,” she wrote. “It hurt me to see him hurt like this, especially over something he cannot help.”
Crosby herself responded to Brandy’s Facebook post to explain and defend her actions.
“I run a food service business where people dine in,” she wrote. “I do not see absolutely anything wrong with what I did. He would come in at lunch time and sit at the food booths right at my busy time everyday. I have bills to pay to and I work very hard to please my customers.”
Crosby’s Facebook account appears to be deactivated, but her comment was supposedly captured in a screenshot before being removed.
Brandy pointed out that her father doesn’t have the money to do reconstructive surgery, and she made a GoFundMe page for him — although she later removed the link to it from her Facebook post, saying that she didn’t want the post “to be about the money.” Instead, both she and her father are telling his story to raise awareness of the discrimination that happens to people in similar situations.
Evans himself told WCIV he’s talking about the incident so the shop manager and others can “find it in her heart to treat people with disabilities in a different manner. We don’t want to be treated like that. We’re human beings.”
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