The chairman and CEO of Papa John's, John Schnatter, has apologized to a customer in Sanford, Florida - the town where Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in February 2012 - after a delivery man accidentally left a racist "butt-dialed" voicemail on the customer's phone. The customer has posted a video on YouTube which includes the voicemail's audio. On it, one employee complains about the tip - which the customer says came out to over 20 percent - and lets out a barrage of racial slurs to the tune of opera "The Wedding of Figaro" and the theme song of TV show "SWAT", while the other employee laughs. In Schnatter's Facebook apology, the CEO wrote that both employees had since been fired. Watch the customer's video and listen to the voicemail audio here.
"Their thinking and actions defy both my personal and the company's values, and everything for which this company stands. The employees responsible for this absolutely unacceptable behavior were immediately terminated," Schnatter wrote, adding, "I have personally reached out to our customer to share my own thoughts and offer my deepest apology."
The manager of the Sanford store has since confirmed that the video posted to YouTube is in fact authentic, and told the Daily Dot that the store has gotten about 300 calls since the news first broke, many of which have been from angry citizens.
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Sanford became a national name after the teenager Trayvon Martin was shot to death last February in what shooter George Zimmerman described as an act of self-defense. Zimmerman's trial for second-degree murder is scheduled to begin on June 10. A court hearing beginning today will determine how Martin should be portrayed to a jury - the defense wants to use pieces of evidence suggesting that the 17-year-old Martin had used marijuana recently, been suspended from school, and otherwise presented himself as "street wise", while the prosecution will argue that the way Martin portrayed himself to friends is irrelevant.
This isn't the first time a Papa John's location has been the object of approbation for an employee's racist comment. In January 2012, ProPublica communications manager Minhee Cho tweeted a photo of a receipt she'd received at a New York City store in which her name appeared as "lady chinky eyes". After it was retweeted by hundreds of people, the chain fired the employee soon after and issued a Facebook apology.
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