Stephanie Dilyard 7-Eleven clerk fired for using weapon during attack at Oklahoma store cause it went against store policy.
Maybe she’d still have a job if she just let the customer dupe the store with a fraud $100 bill? Or if the store had better security in place?
An Oklahoma 7-Eleven clerk has been fired for shooting at a customer who moments earlier had threatened her life and was attempting to strangle her. The worker’s firing comes as a result of store policy which forbids the use of firearms.
Stephanie Dilyard, 25, said she was working alone at the Oklahoma City 7-Eleven just after midnight Nov. 14 when Kenneth Thompson, 59, came in and tried to pay with a counterfeit $100 bill, KOKH reported.
7-Eleven shooting leads to debate over right to self defense vs company policy
The mother of three said that when she called the customer out on the bogus bill, he began threatening her and became erratic.
‘He threatened me, and said he was gonna slice my head off, and that’s when I tried to call the police,’ the convenience store worker recalled.
Dilyard said the man began throwing objects at her before going behind the counter and putting his hands on her.
‘I tried to run off, but he grabbed his hands around my neck, and pushed me out of the counter space, and that’s when I pulled out my gun and I shot him,’ the worker said.
The man fled the store after he was shot in the stomach. Thompson made it a few blocks away from the 7-Eleven before calling 911.
Thompson was taken into custody at the hospital and charged with assault and battery, threatening acts of violence, attempting to pass counterfeit currency, and violating parole on an outstanding felony warrant.
Investigators ruled that Dilyard’s actions were justified under Oklahoma’s stand-your-ground law, which allows people to use deadly force when confronting an imminent threat of death or serious harm.
Profits over worker rights and safety?
While authorities cleared Dilyard of any wrong doing, her employer fired her just days after on Nov. 17.
‘They said that they were going to separate from employment because of a violation of policy,’ said Dilyard, who had been working the overnight shift alone from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. for more than two years.
Dilyard who has zero regrets about losing her job says at the time of the ‘life or death’ incident, all she cared about was getting home to her kids, ‘alive’.
‘This was a situation where I felt like I was put into a corner between choosing between my job, and my life, and I’m always going to choose my life because there’s people that depend on me. Just, ‘I’m going, I’m going home,’ you know. I need to be here for my kids,’ the mom said.
Dilyard hopes the episode will lead to the convenience store putting into place new policies that ‘better protect clerks’ — especially women — and ensure they aren’t afraid to defend themselves when facing a life-or-death threat.
Fired 7-Eleven worker, ‘You have a right to defend yourself!’
‘If I’ve known that there’s a potential that somebody is for real on taking my life away that I will do whatever it takes, and I hope that women see that, and they’ll do the same thing,’ the worker said.
‘You have a right to defend yourself.’
Since losing her job, Dilyard has launched a GoFundMe to help her family with expenses while she’s out of work.
‘We have no security, and we are not allowed to carry self-defense weapons, including mace,’ the former convenience store worker wrote on the fundraiser. ‘That’s is why I decided to carry in the first place.’
‘I never expected for me to be in this situation, but I did what I had to do to go home to my kids. I was a good employee, committed and determined, but in-between a rock and a hard place I had to make a quick decision — lose my life, or lose my job,’ she added.
