A Florida Chick-fil-A employee is being praised for his heroic actions when he stopped a man from allegedly carjacking a woman and her baby.
The employee, Mykel Gordon, was working at a location in the Fort Walton Beach area Wednesday afternoon when the woman started screaming for help, according to statements from Chick-fil-A and the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.
The woman was getting out of her car in the restaurant’s parking lot when the suspect, William Branch, approached her “wielding a stick and demanding her keys,” authorities said.
Branch then grabbed the keys from the woman’s waistband, opened her car door and got inside, authorities said.
“When the victim began screaming for help an employee at Chick-fil-A ran to intervene,” the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook.
Branch punched Gordon in the face but did not seriously injure him. Cellphone video taken from a witness showed Gordon and Branch wrestling on the ground before other people run over. Gordon then holds Branch down.
Police said Gordon told deputies that Branch had been involved in another incident shortly before the carjacking.
Branch, 43, of DeFuniak Springs, was charged with carjacking with a weapon and battery. It’s not clear if he has obtained an attorney who can speak on his behalf.
The Fort Walton Beach Chick-fil-A called Gordon a “hero” for helping the woman. “At Chick-fil-A our mission is to ‘Serve’ and today Mykel took it further……to ‘Save,'” the restaurant wrote on Facebook.
This isn’t the first time Gordon has lent a helping hand to a customer. In 2018, he helped two teenage girls after a truck failed to negotiate a turn and fell onto the girls’ car, the Northwest Florida Daily News reported.
“God resonates there. It’s a miracle in many ways how this happened. But just to have people like this that step forward and make something happen, I know not everybody is gonna do something like that,” the father of one of the girls told the newspaper.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
