LF: CVS Employee Stops Robbery, Gets Fired

GREENFIELD, Ind- What would you do if someone tried to rob you?

Would you do what they say or would you fight back?

It was a choice one man in Greenfield had to make at work...in a split second.

He chose to fight back and lost his job because of it.

Zac Phillips is still trying to process everything that has happened to him in less than two weeks.

He had a job working at CVS for five years and the choice he made, cost him his job.

"You really don't have time to think in these situations it happened in a flash," said Phillips. showed my pharmacist a note saying this is a pharmacy robbery.

Phillips told WISH TV the robbery happened in November at the CVS on State Street in Greenfield.

"He showed my pharmacist a note saying this is a pharmacy robbery," Phillips said.

The robbery attempt started in the back of the store.

The pharmacist at CVS walked the robber to the front of the store where Phillips was working.

Five years ago, someone else robbed the CVS store while Phillips was there, too. "He punched me in the face and hit me with a bottle of laundry soap."

Phillips shared a video of the most recent incident with WISH TV. He said the video shows the pharmacist telling him what was happening.

"Then, he put his hands on my pharmacist and I was right there when it happened," Phillips said. "I didn't know what was going to happen from that point. But, I wasn't going to let him hurt my pharmacist."

The two store employees tackled the robber.

Phillips said, "People are human. They react at things. Especially when you see someone going after someone you consider a friend, your instinct is to protect them."

Police arrested the man they say is in this video, Jagger Maupin, 22, from Franklin.

Maupin faces a slew of charges including pharmacy robbery.

Yet a few days later, CVS fired Phillips and the pharmacist.

"When you have a half second to think about it, you don't think about policy, you think about friends life, and who this guy might endanger if he had gotten drugs?" Phillips said.

CVS said "by initiating physical confrontation" they broke store policy.

"We're not allowed to fight back, we're not allowed to do anything," Philips said. "We're just supposed to let them have these dangerous drugs and be on their way. They don't value anybody; they don't value employees; they don't value customers. They value money."

Now, Phillips is out of work, but he says his actions could have saved lives.

CVS Pharmacy issued this statement:

The safety and well-being of our customers and employees is always our highest priority. We have stringent security policies and procedures in place to prohibit actions by employees that would jeopardize their safety and the safety of others. The actions of two employees at our Greenfield store during a recent attempted robbery violated those policies and procedures by initiating a physical confrontation, which led to our decision to separate them from the company.

Story by Eric Feldman

He, the pharmacist, and every other employee terminated by CVS in the past two years for self- defense should come together in a class action lawsuit, filed in a state like California, against CVS. Sue them or $110 million apiece plus legal costs.

I definitely agree. Normally, when one is hired to work for a company like this, they have to go through a training procedure on how to deal with robberies like this. But I also suspect that this robbery was an inside job. I sense they had people assisting them.

Once a threat to life is presented, the employer’s authority ends completely unless that employer is law enforcement or the military. Civilians have the right to defend their own lives any way they see fit, and the authority of management of convenience stores ought to end. The right to defend one’s life supersedes the management authority of some commercial enterprise. Or it ought to. Obviously. Since I expect that legislators might think differently, this sort of thing is best decided by a jury. That’s where real democratic opinion on this matter can be found.

We do it all the time in legislatures (law is legislated morality) and court cases.

You and I have different views of "right". So does everybody else. To have a rule, we have to vote on it.