Massachusetts farm security guards wrongly accuse black family of stealing six apples
Danvers, Massachusetts Sept 12 2021
A Massachusetts farm reportedly apologized to a couple that said it racially profiled them over Labor Day weekend.
Manikka Bowman and Jeff Myers went to Connors Farm in Danvers, Massachusetts, with their two children, aged 18 months and 7-years-old, on Monday, as they shared in a blog post. The farm features fall-themed activities, like corn mazes and apple picking.
In the blog post, Bowman and Myers, who are both Black, wrote that they paid “more than $100 on all-day admission,” bought food and beverages, and donated to a scholarship fund the farm advertised throughout the day.
The family also picked apples during their visit.
When Bowman looked into her family’s apple bag, she realized her daughters had picked six extra apples than they had been allotted “in their apple-picking excitement,” as she wrote in her post.
“I assumed we’d have a chance to pay for the extras in our final checkout,” Bowman said in the post. “With families being primary customers, surely, we couldn’t be the first to have excitedly over-picked by a few apples – six in our case.”
But as they were heading to the farm store, the family was stopped by a security guard, they wrote in the post. He and another security guard took the family to the farm store, where a third employee joined them, and reportedly searched Bowman’s bag for “concealed” fruit.
Bowman and Myers asked to speak to a manager, who the third employee identified himself as. They then asked the manager for the owner’s contact information, according to their blog post. The self-identified manager called the police after they pushed for the information.
The couple said the police officer who arrived did not listen to them, instead taking the manager’s word. He eventually accused Bowman and Myers of “playing the race card,” as they wrote in the blog post.
“By jumping straight to an assumption of theft, Connors Farm created a scene, harassing us and causing our 7-year-old to burst into tears, anguish that lasted well into the evening,” they wrote.
During the incident, the couple’s bag, which they paid for, was not filled back to capacity, meaning Connors Farm actually overcharged Bowman and Myers for their apples after all the back-and-forth.
In the same blog post, the couple requested a written apology from Connors Farm, a refund in the form of a donation to the to the Essex County Community Foundation for their racial equity work, and additional diversity and inclusion training for Farm employees.
The company issued a public apology about the incident on its website.
“We regret the incident that happened this past weekend,” the statement read. “We have extended our personal apology to the family. We do our best to train our employees to handle all customer issues with courtesy and respect at all times.”
“We are taking further steps to ensure that staff will undergo diversity, equity and inclusion training,” the statement went on to say. “Please know that everybody is welcome on our farm.”
The apology was shared on the Connors Farm Facebook page according to The Independent, but the company’s social media pages appear to have been deactivated at the time of writing.
