Health Food Store Employee Arrested After Harassing Jewish Co-Worker
(JTA) — A former employee of a health food store in New York who was fired for anti-Semitic comments and actions against a Jewish co-worker was arrested for the hate crime.
William Sullivan, 21, of Saugerties in southeast New York, was charged with second degree aggravated harassment. He is scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined in a press conference on Friday to announce the arrest.
“It’s hard for me even to believe this is happening,” Cuomo said of the March 11 incident at Mother Earth’s Storehouse in Ulster, New York. “What makes it worse, frankly, is that this is not an isolated situation,” he said. “We have been seeing a growing number of anti-Semitic activity.”
In the incident, Sullivan turned the light off in the produce cooler and told a fellow employee named Sarah “you’re in the gas chamber,” then called her a “f**king Jew.”
The Jewish employee told her supervisors and reported the incident to police. Two days after the incident Sullivan harassed her with anti-Semitic epithets again and was fired. The Jewish employee quit the job she had been in for more than a year after the incidents.
The store posted an apology on Facebook, though some comments suggested that it was too little too late.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO