NEW YORK — An order of cold fries sent hot lead flying outside a McDonald’s in Brooklyn, with a critically-injured employee shot in the neck by a customer’s outraged son, police sources said Tuesday.
The 23-year-old fast food employee was taking orders about 7 p.m. Monday inside the Bedford-Stuyvesant eatery when a 40-year-old customer, while chatting on FaceTime with her son, complained that her French fries were cold, police sources said.
The son, listening in as his mother argued with store employees, then appeared out of nowhere outside the McDonald’s and joined the escalating fast-food fracas, pulling a 9mm handgun and shooting the worker on Fulton St. near Throop Ave., according to cops.
“We were sitting her and we heard ‘pop!’” said a street vendor who described the shooting victim, bleeding from a bullet wound, lying on the concrete after the gunfire.
“In McDonald’s, they had an argument over French fries ... He was hard-working. He was defending his co-workers.”
The victim’s weeping colleagues stood vigil as they waited for an ambulance to arrive, with some shouting at the shooting suspect’s mother once police arrived, according to a second street vendor. The woman also recounted seeing one man on the street removing his shirt and using it to staunch the worker’s bleeding.
The victim was hit on the side of his neck, just above the jawline, and was listed in critical condition Tuesday at Brookdale University Hospital, authorities said.
“(A) really nice guy,” said one of victim’s co-workers about the McDonald’s employee.
The mother told police she heard the gunshot but did not see the shooting, sources said. A single shell casing was recovered at the scene.
“She must have been in shock, because she was giving out all the information about what happened,” said the eyewitness vendor. “She admitted that she called her son.”
The 20-year-old suspect, who lives with his mother about four blocks away, was taken into custody for questioning at the 79th Precinct stationhouse. Charges against him were pending.
A police source said the NYPD had already been looking to speak with the suspect about a non-fatal Bedford-Stuyvesant shooting they believe he witnessed in May.
Another local businessman watched in horror as the victim was loaded into an ambulance, with the incident bringing back memories of his own son’s shooting.
“It was really disturbing for me,” he said. “I took it personally.”
The bizarre incident was reminiscent of the fatal shooting of a Chinese food deliveryman this past April by a customer enraged over a lack of duck sauce with his order.
The McDonald’s shooting was not the first violent incident in the city’s fast food outlets this year.
On March 28, parolee Rasheed Osundairo, 31, allegedly knocked fellow customer Melvin Dizon out cold while the victim was order breakfast at the McDonald’s on Seventh Ave. near Madison Square Garden as other stunned customers stood by, unwilling to get involved.
Earlier that month, an outraged customer stabbed a worker armed with a stick multiple times during a crazed morning clash inside a McDonald’s in East Harlem, only a few steps from a Burger King where a teenage cashier was gunned down during a Jan. 9 holdup, cops said.
