Should This Rockford Subway Employee Have Been Suspended For Self-Defense?

A woman working alone at a Subway in Rockford fought off a would be robber and now is being suspended for it.

Araceli Sotelo is the worker that is being assaulted in the above video. Mystateline caught up with her and asked her about what happened. She described the incident. The attacker came into the store where she was the only worker and demanded Soto give him all the money she had. When Soto explained she did not have any money, the suspect grabbed her purse and that's when Soto began to defend herself.

Sotelo said that she was bigger than him and that fact led to the scene above where Sotelo eventually wound up with the suspects gun before bashing him in the head with the weapon.

After the video was posted online was when Soto found out that she was suspended:

“I get a call yesterday it was like, ‘if every one of these videos are not taken offline you will be suspended,’ and then I texted them and I’m like ‘how long am I suspended for?’ They said till everything is removed online. I have no ability to do that,” Sotelo said.

Sotelo believes that she was suspended because the owners of the Subway store did not want corporate to find out about the incident.

The toothpaste maybe well out of the tube on this one for Subway because the video has begun to go viral on the internet and is being picked up by multiple new sources.

Subway has not commented on the incident on the local or national level. Many companies do not want their employees to interact with individuals trying to cause violence in workplaces for insurance reasons. Subway probably has a similar policy in place but the optics on this are horrible for the sandwich franchise.