NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — An employee at a Virginia Country Inn & Suites by Radisson has been fired after a Facebook video captured him calling a black customer an “[expletive] monkey,” according to WTKR.
The hotel guest, Dee Fogleman, recorded the video on May 4 after he went to tell an employee that his mother’s room smelled like smoke, according to Kelsey Cunningham, Fogleman’s wife. The cellphone footage shows the employee pointing at the camera and saying, “Get your family and get out, I don’t care,” before saying the slur as he turned around.
“It’s hurtful. We have two small children that were also in the hotel,” Cunningham said. “It just shouldn’t be tolerated at this point and that’s why we decided to share the video.”
According to the hotel’s general manager, Lisa Little, the employee in the video had only worked for the Newport News hotel for a few weeks.
Little sent the following statement:
On behalf of the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson Newport News, Va. I want to apologize for the inappropriate behavior and comments of one of our employees from an incident that occurred on Friday, May 4. We are taking this matter very seriously and effective today (May 7, 2018), the employee in the video has been terminated. As a result of this incident we will also be re-training every employee this week on our code-of-conduct policies to help ensure something like this never happens again.
