Restaurant Manager Fends Off Attacker With Grill Scraper

If you’ve ever worked at a restaurant with a grill, you know what a grill scraper is. They sell them for home grills, too, but they’re not quite the same. Either way, though, they’re cleaning implements, not weapons.

But the real weapon is, and always will be, the person. 

While bad guys make use of this all the time, a restaurant manager in Alexandria, VA, showed that the good guys can, too, when he used an unlikely weapon.

Staffers at a restaurant in the Potomac Yard area recently fought off a knife-wielding attempted robber and are telling their story.

On the night of Sept. 1, manager Merve McDonald was behind the counter at Omar’s Pitas & Platters (3100 Richmond Highway) and turned his back momentarily when the commotion started.

As staff were gearing up to close for the night, McDonald said a man holding a hunting knife walked in, jumped over the counter and demanded staff open the register or he would kill them. McDonald said he shouted for help from his staff and was forced to defend himself with a foot-long grill scraper when the suspect lunged at him.

“Nothing like that has ever happened to me,” McDonald said. “I didn’t have a choice. If he just stayed in front of the counter and flashed the knife, we probably would have given him the money in the register.”

…

The Alexandria Police Department said the suspect was “heavily bleeding” and fled on foot. An APD K-9 officer followed a blood trail four blocks to a home in the 300 block of Hume Avenue, where they found the suspect, Stanley Tirone Rivers, injured and “hiding under his mother’s bed,” according to the affidavit.

Not the weapon I’d have chosen in a restaurant since, you know, knives are a thing, but it was probably the smarter move. It’s not a matter of whether you’ll get cut in a knife fight, but how badly you’ll be cut. A foot-long thing with a blade on the end makes a surprising amount of sense.

And even if it was a stupid choice, there’s my preferred paraphrase of an old saying: If it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

McDonald came out of the encounter fine, but part of that was because his staff came and started throwing things at the suspect. The fact that the big, bad armed robber was hiding under his mommy’s bed just kind of makes the whole thing hysterical to me.

But we need to understand something here. McDonald and his people put up a fight because a fight was more than warranted. They held up fine, and I applaud them. However, they got lucky. They shouldn’t have had to rely on luck. Every workplace needs to allow people to carry a firearm if they legally can. Then, when someone jumps up on the counter because they’ve played too much Grand Theft Auto and threatens people, the bleeding they suffer can be much more severe.

Grill scrapers aren’t a substitute for 9mm, .38, .357, .40, .45, or a whole range of other calibers.

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