FORMER TACO BELL WORKER ONCE ROBBED AT GUNPOINT GIVES EMPLOYEES MONEY

As a 16-year-old Taco Bell employee, Shan Dan Horan wasn’t expecting to find a gun to his head while he closed up shop.

But that’s what happened in December 2001, when a robber in a paintball mask and black gloves cut the restaurant’s phone lines while pointing a gun at him and ordering other employees not to watch. At the same time, an accomplice demanded money from a worker near the restaurant’s safe, according to an Arizona Daily Sun article published the next day.

“If you move, I’ll kill you,” the first robber told employees.

Nineteen years after the robbers fled the Flagstaff, Ariz., restaurant with cash, Horan decided to visit another Taco Bell location on Monday for a taste of irony — and then spontaneously gifted $100 to each of the five employees on-site in gratitude for their work.

Horan said he would always remember not just being robbed two decades ago, but also the sacrifices of his service-industry colleagues.

“So today I thought I would drop a different type of lettuce off to the employees at my neighborhood Taco Bell to thank them for feeding us all during this pandemic,” Horan, who now works in the music industry, wrote about his trip to the restaurant in Sacramento’s Pocket neighborhood.

While Horan wrote that his gesture came on the robbery’s 20th anniversary, the Daily Sun article indicates the crime happened in 2001. The number of years seems to be beyond the point for Doran, who said the robbery represented one of the scariest moments of his life and came while he was trying to save money for college and to buy his family Christmas gifts.

Doran said he calls Dec. 14 his “life day” in recognition of how close he came to losing his life.

His trip to a Taco Bell on Monday was initially meant to be just a darkly humorous lunch option. But after placing an order, Horan told KXTV, he started recounting the robbery to the restaurant employees and decided to drop five $100 bills on the counter for them.