- A 74-year-old Colorado woman said she's been fired from her convenience store clerk job after explaining a robbery to her boss.
- Mary Moreno had attempted to fend off a robber in October 2020 who had come into the store during her night shift.
A 74-year-old woman says she was fired after she told her boss at a convenience store that a robber who had come in during one of her shifts had a knife on him, CBS Colorado reported.
The woman, Mary Moreno, said a robber came in to Circle-K in Westminster, Colorado, where she worked during one of her night shifts when she had been scheduled to work alone, CBS Colorado reported.
Moreno said a man came in holding "two hunting knives," according to CBS Colorado, and asked her for cigarettes.
"He kept insisting 'you have to give them to me.' He said 'you have to give them to me,'" Moreno said.
She refused to hand over the cigarettes and then the man walked around the counter toward her. So Moreno, in an effort to fend him off, said she "pushed his arm" and he "took off," CBS Colorado reported.
"I was shaking so bad that I couldn't hold myself still," she said. "I was just wanting to get him out of there."
After the incident, she told her boss what happened and said he didn't believe it, she said, despite video footage of the night.
"He took me in the office, and he said, well, I don't see a knife, because he watched the video, I guess. And I said, 'Well there was a knife,'" Moreno said.
The boss, she said, insisted that Moreno apologize. When Moreno refused, she was fired. Now she's taking legal action against the store.
"I'm not doing it for money. I'm doing it because of the way they treat their employees," she said, per CBS Colorado.
Prior to the robbery, Moreno said she's been a good employee at Circle-K for 16 years.
"I went on and beyond what they expected of me," she said, per CBS Colorado.
But then new management took over, and her boss suddenly started to schedule her shifts so that she'd work alone in the store and during night hours without breaks.
Couche-Tard, which acquired Circle-K in 2003, did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.