Every job as its potential dangers and threats, and for any place that features a cash register, one of those threats is the possibility of a robbery .
It can be frightening to think about, and difficult to know what to do in the moment. When one Subway employee was being threatened with an armed robbery, she took action and stopped it in its tracks, but is now facing consequences.
A Subway employee displayed her bravery in a courageous act, recently, and impressed millions online.
But she only ended up receiving punishment for it.
Araceli Sotelo of Rockford, Illinois, was working alone at a Subway when an armed robber came in and began demanding money.
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She uploaded a security footage video of the encounter to her TikTok account, [@yadalove07]( https://www.tiktok.com/@yadalove07] . It now has 2 million likes and over 9 million views, as of this writing.
The video starts with her shouting, trying to get the man to leave.
“He kind of just showed me his gun, and I was like freaking out like, ‘woah [ sic ] you can’t do that please leave’,” Sotelo said in an interview with Daily Mail.
“[He said] ‘give me all the money’ and I said ‘I do not have any money, like, I do not have any money.’ That is all I had and he was just like, ‘give me everything before I hurt you’.”
He refused to leave and grabbed her purse from her, spurring her to fight back.
They’re still behind the counter when the physicality begins, but Sotelo quickly pulls the man out into the front of the store, in full view of the cameras.
“He was smaller than me, so I have that advantage,” Sotelo said, “I’m bigger than him, so I could at least put my weight on him, push him, or something.”
It doesn’t stop there though, she fully disarms him.
The man drops Sotelo’s purse, a red scarf, and his gun on the ground. He’d also previously lost the hoodie he’d been wearing.
Sotelo grabs the gun and the hoodie while the thief picks her purse back up. Gun in hand, Sotelo demands he give her purse back, then hits the man with his own gun.
The video ends soon after that, but Sotelo made it out of the altercation unharmed.
“He dropped (the gun) trying to hold onto my purse, and I end up pulling his sweatshirt off him and I was like ‘show your face, show your face, you are on camera.’ and he was like ‘here you can have your purse back just give me back my stuff.’ He wanted me to give him back his gun and his clothes” she explained.
Although Sotelo’s heroism stopped the store from being robbed, her employer is far from happy.
She was suspended a few days after the event took place.
She was told she’d be suspended until every copy of the video was taken offline, which she has no power over. She claims she wasn’t even the original leaker of the video, only posting it to her own account after she’d seen it going around.
She’s not letting Subway get to her that easily, though.
“They did not want anyone to know, they wanted to be private that it happened to me and that I fought back, but I think they did that because they do not want corporate to know.”
Sotelo’s mother started a GoFundMe , originally to cover the cost of her lost purse and phone that got broken, but now to cover her lost wages and to pay for an attorney as well.
h/t: LadBible
