Florida woman jailed (again) for refusing to wear a mask

Cindy Falco Dicorrado may have wanted a bagel at an Einstein Bros. Bagels near Boca Raton but she may have had to settle for eating one in a Palm Beach County jail the next morning.

Dicorrado, 62, who lives in Boynton Beach, was arrested Thursday morning after she refused to leave an Einstein bagel shop at 9795 Glades Rd. because she refused to wear a mask. There is a mask mandate in Palm Beach County due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is currently surging in Florida.

Palm Beach County has had more than 96,000 confirmed cases and more than 2,000 deaths since the novel coronavirus pandemic began, according to the Florida Department of Health.

But Dicorrado, according to a Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office probable cause affidavit, was inside the bagel shop “screaming” at customers and employees “you are violating my rights” and “you are violating the constitution” after manager Ann Marie Campian repeatedly asked her to wear the required mask.

Dicorrado was arrested and charged with trespassing and resisting an officer without violence. She was held on a $2,000 total bond and released on Friday.

According to the arrest report, when deputies went into Einstein they saw Dicorrado “standing in front of the counter screaming loudly at customers and employees” and shouting “I am not leaving that is discrimination.”

When an officer asked her to step outside, Dicorrado refused, starting quoted “Constitution codes and discrimination statutes” and screamed at the officer “and told a younger Black female to record the interaction,” the report said.

The deputy, the affidavit said, told Dicorrado that she would have to leave or be arrested for trespassing. She wouldn’t. While this was going on, Campian, in front of officers, once again asked Dicorrado to leave the bagel shop.

So, according to the report, the deputy “grabbed her gently by her left wrist” upon which Dicorrado “pulled back and refused to obey my verbal commands.”

Another officer then assisted and between the two of them, Dicorrado was escorted out of Einstein Bros. Bagels in handcuffs.

The incident began making the rounds with video postings on social media. “Get your hands off of me. You are kidnapping me,” she is heard yelling at the officer.

On May 30, 2020, Dicorrado was arrested and charged with trespassing and resisting arrest without violence for protesting, along with two other women, the wearing of masks while in a parking lot outside a Sunshine Market on South Military Trail in West Palm Beach, according to court records.

In 2017, Dicorrado resigned from the Boynton Beach Community Redevelopment Agency’s advisory board after she was “accused of being a white supremacist and racist, based on comments she made while discussing sanctuary cities,” according to The Palm Beach Post.

There have been numerous similar incidents in Florida in which people refuse to wear a mask to protect themselves, and others, from COVID-19.

In December, a man who was upset with a Florida Best Buy store’s coronavirus mask policy in Vero Beach wound up in jail after creating a disturbance. The customer “cough, sneeze and spit” all over the store’s Geek Squad counter, according to a police report from the Indian County Sheriff ’s Office.