Pictured above: Far left – Myron Lester. Third from the left – Pierre Westbrooks.
Munoz had reached his limit. He recalled that Salazar had expressed to him that if any employees needed to leave prematurely due to a personal emergency of any kind, they could go back on a Greyhound. He phoned Salazar to tell him that he needed to leave, and asked if he needed to pay for the bus himself. Salazar told him he did not, and that he would call his boss to make the necessary arrangements.
“He said, ‘Gimme, like, 15 minutes,’” says Munoz. “I waited, and he took longer than 15 minutes, so I decided on my own to call Ron, the guy who was in charge.”
Munoz called Hill, who also assured him that they would help him get back a Greyhound back to town. Unlike Salazar, though, Hill asked why Munoz needed to leave, and Munoz told him that the conditions at the campground made him uncomfortable.
Hill told Munoz that he would pay out of pocket to cover the cost of his shuttle ride, and even offered that he come back to the Empire Polo Club the following week for Stagecoach Festival, as Securacorp was also contracted to provide security staffing for the Goldenvoice-produced country music event. Munoz purported that he offered numerous times to call an Uber to the Greyhound station himself, but Hill insisted on covering it.
“We ended up waiting pretty much the whole night, like another three hours, trying to get to the Greyhound station” Munoz said. “He was looking for his car, then he was waiting for somebody to pick us up, and nothing happened until finally they took us to the Greyhound station – which they had trouble finding for at least an hour – and then when we got there it was closed.”
Munoz estimates the time at that point to have been roughly 4:00 AM, and he was assured that he would be taken back first thing in the morning, still at no expense of his own. He was taken to the section of the Empire Polo Fields set aside for car camping so that he could try to take a nap.
Upon his arrival, however, he met a member of Securacorp’s leadership named Myron Lester who subjected him to even worse humiliation than that which he had already experienced.
“This guy Myron came, and as soon as he came he started yelling at me, saying, ‘Everyone here has been working, and you’re making everyone stay up because you wanna go home and everyone has to work in a couple hours,’” Munoz said. “I told him, ‘I’ve been trying to go home. I even said I would take an Uber there.’ If I’d have taken the Uber there, I would have gotten there before it closed.”
Lester continued to disrespect and belittle him, and was joined shortly thereafter by his partner, Pierre Westbrooks. The two of them ordered Munoz into a truck, where he discovered that they had been informed of his encounter with the Staff Pro security guards on the festival grounds. Lester and Westbrooks were under the false impression that he had been kicked out of the festival and scolded him for it, telling him that they refused to pay for his Greyhound fare. “They said, ‘You pay for your own shit,’” Munoz recalled. “‘If you wanna go home, you pay for that shit.’”
Lester and Westbrooks kicked him out of the car and continued to make disparaging remarks about him. Anytime he would try to explain that he had been told he could enter the festival grounds on his free time, they cut him off. They told him that they were going to drive him back to the Greyhound station and simply leave him there to wait and figure out the next step on his own.
Fortunately, somebody else who witnessed Munoz’ run-in with the Staff Pro guards came to his aid at that point. “Some other guy stuck his neck out for me,” he remembered, “some guy who I guess actually saw what happened with the security guards. He said ‘No, they didn’t get kicked out; they had to let them go. It’s fine.’”
Lester and Westbrooks calmed down somewhat, and told him that they would have someone take him to the Greyhound station in the morning – but still refused to pay for his ticket. Munoz said that they told him they were only required to pay his way back if they fired him, not if he left on his own.
At that point, it was around 5:00 AM and there was nowhere for Munoz to sleep in the car parking area. In one last dehumanizing gesture, Lester and Westbrooks pointed him in the direction of a U-Haul trailer and told him he could sleep in it.
Munoz says:
“They opened it, and I don’t know the measurements but I was too tall for it. I’m, like, six feet tall, so it was maybe four feet across. I had to arch my feet up just to be comfortable, and there was all this dirt and stuff in there. It was wet, too. That was it. They just left me like that. They didn’t care. I just stayed there and didn’t even sleep. I just stayed there and waited until the Greyhound came, then I just got out of the trailer, took an Uber to the Greyhound station and just came home.”
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