Several weeks passed after the second weekend of Coachella wrapped up, and Munoz still hadn’t received his paycheck. He called Salazar numerous times, but Salazar would only respond to him through text messages and tell him to send an email to Securacorp’s Yahoo account. To this day, Munoz has still not received any pay for work he performed.
Disturbingly, elements of Munoz’ experience with Securacorp seem to have been echoed not only from other employees of the company, but by those who worked for separate security staffing companies altogether.
A woman named Dana Renee Varga who also contacted Austin Burke after seeing the same original Facebook post that Munoz did heard back from him and ended up getting hired by Top Of The Line (TOTL), which is owned by Staff Pro (the company whose security guards surrounded Munoz on the festival grounds). Even though the campsite at which she stayed was on the opposite corner of Empire Polo Club, she described the conditions with startling similarity.
“It was basically a mini Skid Row,” she said. “There were people drinking and fighting, I got harassed by three guys within a matter of ten minutes. It was a hot-ass mess…There was no security for the security, and the security needed security.”
Varga recalls that the TOTL staff also didn’t provide tents or sleeping bags for their employees. In addition, a broken water line kept the employees from showering for a length of time – and while she eventually was paid, it was for $10/hr instead of the $12/hr she was promised and she received it a month after Coachella ended.
Perhaps the most egregious oversight of the TOTL camps was that the shuttles that were supposed to transport employees from the festival grounds to the campsite ran few and far between. “There were never any shuttles, so after my shift I would have to walk back to the campsite,” Varga recalled.
According to rumors that circulated after the first weekend of Coachella, the absence of shuttles had been what led to the death of 18-year-old Michala Freeland, who was hit by a 1990s model Jeep Grand Cherokee while walking back from to the campsite on the evening of April 15th.
Varga claims that Burke never answered her calls or texts the entire weekend she worked, and only texted her back one time after the fact.
On May 11th, she shared her testimonial in the same Facebook group in which he posted the original help wanted ad, and he engaged her in an argument over pay period logistics in the comment thread that ensued. The same day, he posted a rant that vaguely alluded to the situation before dovetailing into an advertisement for security job openings for EDC Las Vegas, which will take place this next weekend at the Las Vegas Speedway.
After hearing Munoz’ story, we reached out to several of the individuals he mentioned to hear their versions of the story. Myron Lester spoke with us very briefly before hanging up. He claimed that he did not remember Chris Munoz, nor did he recall whether or not he had kicked an employee out of a truck – but if he had, “it was something that [they] did.”
Ron Hill turned out to be more inclined to speak with us. He asserted that most of the issues that arose over both weekends of Coachella occurred because 2016 marked the first edition of the festival in which Goldenvoice had brought on Securacorp, but stressed that he wasn’t in any way involved with employee payroll.
Hill explained:
I didn’t deal with the money situation. When I was there, all I did was general management. When I left, the reason was that I didn’t feel like the shit was working. All I can do is say it was our first event and shit didn’t go right because nobody knew what they were doing. When I got there, I had shit going for people because that’s what I do…I can’t say why things went the way they did, or why they acted like that. I know Chris. Chris is a good person, and whatever happened to him was wrong regardless, and there were a lot of situations that went wrong.
As heartfelt as Hill tried to make his reflections on Coachella 2016 sound, what he said next casted a disingenuous shadow over it. When asked what details he’d heard regarding Freeland’s death, he told us:
All anybody knows is that a girl got killed. Nobody knows exactly what happened inside, but I was there – and I do have info on stuff that everybody should know about Coachella and the way that shit was ran. Now, if you were to pay me for that information…
Just when we thought we’d reached the bottom, we overturned a major stone when we reached out to Pierre Westbrooks, whom Munoz had claimed joined Lester in verbally accosting him at the car camping area. Oddly enough, it turned out that Westbrooks was the CEO of Securacorp.
“Everybody was trained,” Westbrooks insisted during our phone call with him. “They were trained properly. Everybody was there to work, they were not there to party.” He also said that employees were given three meals each day (Munoz only claimed to have had one) and that they were provided with tents and sleeping bags, maintaining that he had receipts to prove both.
“There were certain things we were blindsided by, but we took care of it,” he said. “We did the best we could. We were the only ones who fed our people.”
More importantly, Westbrooks claimed that he had no recollection of Munoz.
After taking a look at Lester and Westbrooks’ Facebook profiles, Munoz confirmed that they were indeed the two men who berated him at the car camping area before recommending that he sleep in a U-Haul Trailer. Westbrooks refused to acknowledge that any part of the incident actually happened, and when asked if he was denying that it happened, he firmly said, “Yes I am.”
