Nordstrom execs upset by cuffing of Black employee after police shut down Coral Gables mall
Coral Gables police alerted to a possible armed robbery in progress last week at the Gucci store in the Village of Merrick Park ordered the mall locked down and showed up in force with weapons drawn.
It turned out there was no robbery. The suspected gunman worked at a nearby store and had a legal concealed weapons permit.
But police did handcuff one person at gunpoint during the Sept 10 incident — a Black male employee at Nordstrom who police say fit the description given of the suspect: braided hair, light shirt, black skin.
No one was hurt and the employee, not identified, was released after about 20 minutes. But the encounter and the response by Coral Gables police were upsetting for the worker and the high-end retailer’s top executives.
In an email sent last week and obtained by the Miami Herald, Jamie Nordstrom, the company’s president of stores, told employees that “we are extremely concerned by the response from police in our store today.” He went on to say, “This situation was incredibly traumatic for this employee, as well as the entire team who experienced it.”
Nordstrom told employees to contact the employee assistance program if they needed further help. Early Tuesday evening, in response to questions from the Miami Herald, Nordstrom released a brief statement saying it had spoken with employees and expressed concerns to Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak.
“We appreciate his [Hudak’s] openness in having an ongoing and productive dialog,” the company said.
Hudak defended the actions of his officers responding to a serious threat at a shopping complex that saw a fatal shooting in 2017. He also praised the Nordstrom staffer.
“Our response was appropriate and my hat is off to the Nordstrom employee for acting as he did,” said Hudak. The employee was “legitimately shook up. I get that. But if the description was of a tall, big, balding white guy [Hudak’s general description], he [Hudak] would have been stopped the exact same way.”
Hudak said he spoke with the company’s general counsel over the phone last week, then had a Zoom chat with Jamie Nordstrom before meeting Tuesday with employees and managers in the store at Merrick Park for about 90 minutes.
The chief said he thought the conversations went well and were “positive” and that he explained police procedures and why the officers acted as they did.
The incident comes amid heightened racial tensions in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Merrick Park also has seen recent violence — the April 2017 shooting at Equinox in the very same mall in which a disgruntled trainer killed two co-workers before turning the gun on himself. At the end of May this year Nordstrom made headlines when two people were shot at an outlet at Aventura Mall.
Gables Police initially released very little information about the mall shutdown, saying only that police were searching for a gunman and that it reopened safely a few hours later. Asked earlier this week for any type of report written up from last week’s incident, a Coral Gables police spokesperson said there wasn’t any.
But according to Hudak and Jamie Nordstrom’s email, mall security called Gables police twice at about 4 p.m. Thursday. One call said a Black male with braids and wearing a white shirt was seen putting a gun into his waistband. The other call, Hudak said, was more troubling: A Gucci store was being robbed at gunpoint.
Police immediately ordered the mall locked down, then went to the Gucci store. From there, the chief said, they were directed to Nordstrom. Hudak said as the store was being evacuated, officers noticed a Black man in a light-colored shirt and with braids making his way down the escalator. He was ordered to the ground at gunpoint, cuffed and remained there until witnesses were located.
“It was 18 minutes until witnesses were found in the parking lot,” Hudak said. “They said it’s not him.”
A further search found another man with a similar description in another store in the mall. The man had a legal concealed weapons permit that his boss was aware of, Hudak said. The search was over, and the lockdown was lifted.
“Our response was exactly what we trained for,” Hudak said.
The email sent out last week, signed by “Pete and Erik” — brothers Peter and Erik Nordstrom run the company along with their cousin Jamie and father Bruce — included a memo from Jamie Nordstrom and Carl Jenkins, a senior vice president, describing the incident. They told workers that discussions with local leaders will continue, “particularly around the theme of working with the police to reduce racial bias.”
“We want to be clear that the company will always stand with our employees to defend their rights and seek justice, as well as ensure our workplaces are safe and secure,” they wrote.
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 5:08 PM.
