Restaurant owner under fire for yelling at crying child
A restaurant owner says she won't apologise to a little girl and her family after she yelled at the toddler for crying in her cafe.
Darla Neugebauer, who runs Marcy’s Diner in Portland, US, says the toddler started crying after her parents ordered three large plates of pancakes but then put them out of her reach.
She claims the girl continued to scream for 40 minutes, causing her to snap.
“I slammed my hands on the counter and I said "this needs to stop' - meaning her screaming - and I pointed at her and she looked at me and she stopped," Neugebauer said.
“And her parents said, "Are you screaming at a child?"'
The girl’s mother, Tara Carson, took to social media to vent her anger, saying she had the ‘worst experience’ at the restaurant.
Ms Carson said her daughter had only been crying for 10 minutes when Ms Neugebauer screamed at her.
“The owner is an absolute lunatic and screamed in the face of my almost two-year-old child because she was crying,” she wrote on the restaurant’s Facbeook page.
“If you have a problem with a child crying then you are not suitable to run a business. If it bothered you so much you should have spoken to me and not traumatised my child.”
Ms Carson said the waitress at the restaurant was very embarrassed by her boss’s behaviour.
“The look of fear in my daughter's face when this woman was yelling at her...she looked at me like "Mommy why is this woman doing this to me?" And I felt helpless as a mom that I couldn't do anything to help her,” Ms Carson told WSHC.
Ms Neugebauer hit back at the young Mum, saying she wouldn’t apologise for her actions.
“You are lucky I didn't get really f****** nuts because being physical is not something I cower from,” she replied to Ms Carson’s comment.
“I might have used poor judgement. I wouldn’t say I was sorry because it stopped. When things stop it's usually a good thing,' she said.
“Life's full of choices and you gotta live with all of them. I chose to yell at the kid. It made her shut up which made me happy, it made my staff happy, it made the other 75 people in the restaurant happy.”
The story has gone viral online, with some people praising Ms Neugebauer, while others have pledged to boycott the restaurant in the future.
Morning news break – July 21
