Attacks on Workers Continue

High Point, NC (WorkersCompensation.com) – A woman stabbed a fast food worker over a sandwich order this  past week, in a continuing assault on workers across the country.   

Police in High Point, N.C., said Demetris Coleman, 45, allegedly stabbed a 16-year-old Jimmy John’s employee on April 25. According to employees at the location, Coleman came to the store to complain about her order, then threw several items at the employee and stabbed her with an edged weapon.   

The employee victim was transported to Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro, officials said.   

"The sheer fact that an adult finds it OK to physically assault someone because a sandwich menu or a sandwich order being wrong is abhorrent,” High Point Police Department Captain Patrick O’Toole told WXII. “The fact that you were willing to assault someone, not only physically but with an edged weapon over a sandwich being wrong, I can't explain how you come to that conclusion."  

Coleman was later arrested at her home and charged with assault with a deadly weapon and injury to real property for damage to the store.  

Employees said Coleman was a known problem customer and had been asked to leave the restaurant on previous occasions.   

More recently, on May 3, two employees of a Spartanburg Krispy Kreme store were hospitalized after a couple argued with them over doughnuts. Police said a couple began arguing with an employee at the drive-through window. The employee told police the customers initially ordered a doughnut the store did not have. When the employee told the couple it was not a doughnut they carried, the customers accused him of having an “attitude.” The employee told the customers to “order doughnuts we have or don’t order at all.”   

After the exchange, the couple entered the lobby yelling. When another employee tried to stop the customers and diffuse the situation, the couple shoved him to the ground where he hit his head on the concrete floor. A third employee also tried to intervene, but was also pushed to the ground.   

Both employees were taken to the hospital for treatment, police said. One employee was in the ICU, as of May 2, and the other had been treated and released, employees said.   

On April 30, police in Baton Rouge, La., said a concession worker stabbed their coworker at Tiger Stadium.   

According to police, the incident happened prior to the Garth Brooks concert. Investigators said the two coworkers got into a fight when one of the workers stabbed the other before fleeing.  

The victim, officials said, was transported to a nearby hospital with minor injuries.   

And in the Bronx, N.Y., a laundromat worker is recovering from surgery after being stabbed by a customer.   

New York Police Department officials said a worker at a laundromat on Boston Road was stabbed repeatedly in a brutal attack in late April.   

Video of the incident shows the attacker dragging the 37-year-old employee across the floor, then stabbing her repeatedly in her head, face and body. The video showed the attacker continue to attack her even after she laid helpless on the floor covered in her own blood. At one point, the suspect shoved a laundry basket on top of her.   

The laundromat manager told ABC7NY that employees at the laundromat were terrified he would come back.   

"The guy is crazy. That man is crazy," the laundromat manager said. "She's not ok. She's not ok."  

Police said the suspect also tried to remove the cash register, according to video footage, before rummaging through boxes under the register. Police said the suspect then stabbed a customer in the hand before fleeing on foot empty handed.   

Both victims were rushed to nearby hospitals. The employee, a mother of four, underwent her second surgery on Wednesday.  

And in Queens, a delivery driver was shot and killed while working.   

NYPD said Zhiwen Yan, 45, was delivering food for The Great Wall, a nearby Chinese restaurant, when a gunman approached him and opened fire.   

Video showed Yan pulling onto 108th Street, police said, when someone approaches Yan as he drives down the street. Yan tries to roll backward on the bike to get away, but the suspect shoots him, the video shows.   

So far, police said, no arrests have been made in connection to the shooting, and an investigation is ongoing.  

A GoFundMe page was created for the family, and has raised more than $144,000 so far.