A Taco Bell manager in Texas poured boiling water on a woman and a girl who asked for their incorrect order to be remade, a lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks damages in excess of $1 million after Brittany Davis and a girl identified as C.T. saw their lives “forever changed” during a June 17 stop at a Taco Bell in Dallas. The pair had asked for their $31 order to be corrected before the alleged attack, according to the filing.
“Instead of simply correcting the order, a Taco Bell employee threatened to fight C.T., a minor, and the Taco Bell store manager violently and without warning poured a bucket of boiling water over C.T.’s and Brittany’s heads, shoulder, breasts and legs, causing excruciating second- and third-degree burns on their bodies,” the lawsuit claims.
The pair were left “burning from the inside out” due to the scalding water that soaked their clothes against their bodies, the lawsuit claims.
“The store they believed would be a place of service and safety quickly turned into a place of horrors,” according to the 19-page Dallas County lawsuit.
The couple had gone through a drive-thru three different times to get their proper order, but Taco Bell workers refused to correct it. An employee then let them into the locked dining room and secured the door shut behind them, according to the lawsuit.
Davis and the girl then discussed their order with Taco Bell workers for 10 minutes before employees “became combative,” the lawsuit claims. A female manager who wasn’t involved in the conversation then came from behind a counter with a “scalding bucket of water” and doused the pair, according to the filing.
Davis and the girl tried to leave the restaurant, but the door was still locked. They managed to get outside just as the manager returned with a second bucket of boiling water, the lawsuit alleges.
“As this family was leaving the parking lot, a Taco Bell employee came outside the front door, laughing, clapping and taunting the family – adding insult to horrific injury,” the filing states.
Davis started having seizures due to the shock of the attack while on the way to a hospital, where the girl ran naked into an emergency room after stripping off her clothes soaked with scalding water, according to the lawsuit.
Davis, of Dallas, had at least 10 seizures and deep burns to her chest and stomach, while the girl had severe burns to her face, chest, legs, arms and stomach, the lawsuit claims.
“When C.T. was released home from the hospital, her mother had to remove all mirrors from the walls, as C.T. could not bear to see her own face,” the filing reads. “The burns to the rest of her body caused her skin to bubble the size of softballs.”
A message seeking comment from Taco Bell reps was not immediately returned early Tuesday. The chain’s parent company, Yum! Brands, a local franchisee and two employees not identified by name in the suit did not respond to requests for comment, the Dallas Morning News reported Monday.
A judge on Friday ordered the Taco Bell location to preserve and turn over photos and video footage from the restaurant during the time of the incident, the newspaper reported.
Dallas police responded to the restaurant in the 11800 block of Adams Road after getting reports of an aggravated assault and an assault on June 17, department officials told the newspaper.