When they asked to be seated together, the manager refused. When they offered to wait or break up into smaller groups, she still would not serve them, although two other parties had been seated in the meantime. And when the leader of the group, Reverend Dell Phillips, finally sat down in a booth with his family, the manager asked an Arapahoe County sheriff's deputy who was dining in the restaurant for help. The deputy called police. When the officers arrived, the churchgoers left. They went to a nearby restaurant, where they ate without incident.
Perkins treated them badly, the churchgoers say, just because they are black.
And they've said it loudly, at two protest rallies: one outside the restaurant at 1111 South Joliet Street on April 5, the second a month later at Mt. Gilead, in east Denver.
Perkins officials, however, say the April 1 snafu was not racially motivated but simply a matter of an understaffed restaurant unable to handle so many people at once. In a press release issued April 4, the company claims that manager Lisa Rathbun asked the group to remain in the lobby until tables could be cleared. Instead, members of the group sat themselves--rudely, according to Perkins; in an act of mild civil disobedience, according to church members.
This isn't the first controversy with racial overtones surrounding that particular Perkins. In February 1997, Devitt Young was arrested for robbing the restaurant at gunpoint. A former cook there, he'd been ID'd by three of his white colleagues--including then-waitress Lisa Rathbun.
Young was locked up, facing four felony counts and the prospect of at least twenty years behind bars if he was convicted. His bond was set at $50,000.
He stayed in the Arapahoe County jail until November 5, 1997. That was the day it took a jury just four hours to find him not guilty.
"Most of us said we don't know why it ever went to trial," says Ed Butterfield, the jury foreman. "It had so many loopholes."
Today Young is a kitchen manager at a Village Inn off I-70. He's soft-spoken, a "milquetoast, quiet guy," as Butterfield describes him.
Despite his low-key demeanor, however, Young has not led a storybook life. He's been separated for four years from his wife. His record includes two drug charges, including a 1994 cocaine bust that he says came about only because he was with someone who had cocaine. Nonetheless, Young pleaded to aiding and abetting and was sent to the federal slammer for two years. That was the only time he'd ever been behind bars--until last year.
When he got out on the drug charge, Young says, he returned to the "trade I can always go back to"--working as a cook. Previously, he'd worked at Mr. Steak; he'd also spent several years at the old King's Table restaurant on Colfax Avenue.
In the spring of 1996, Young was living with his sister, Lisa Wiley, in Aurora. Looking for work in the area, he applied for a job at the Perkins on Joliet Street. "They said my chances were pretty good, so I filled out the application, told them what I could do," he says. "They said that they could use me."
He interviewed the same day and was hired soon after. At the time, he says, he was the only black cook at Perkins and one of only two black employees at the restaurant. There were a few racial comments directed at him--the occasional joke, which he ignored--but overall, Young recalls, "the atmosphere was very friendly. I had no problems with the workers. Basically, I'm the kind of person who keeps to myself unless they talk to me. It went pretty well, I thought. I got along with everybody."
One of his co-workers would even give him rides home, he says. The woman, Shauna Lee Luckey, eventually became one of his accusers.
Although his sister says Young once complained about a manager being a "bitch," Young doesn't recall that. "The only person I would ever consider calling that would be Lisa [Rathbun]," he says. "I don't remember saying it. I do remember telling somebody she was trying to make a name for herself. She was always telling me how to run the kitchen."
In early December 1996, Young moved into a Glendale apartment with a girlfriend. Getting to work on time became a problem. During the space of two weeks, he says, he was late by ten to fifteen minutes three or four times. His manager, Neil La Rue, gave him a written warning. "He said if I keep being late, he was gonna have to let me go," Young says.
Young's other supervisor, Renee Campbell, told him not to worry about the warning, Young says. Since other workers were late and La Rue didn't seem to care about that, Young figured La Rue didn't like black people.
Late Saturday, December 21, Young finished his shift sometime between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. After work, he says, he went to visit his new girlfriend, Shanell Duran, who lived in northwest Denver.
A few hours later, at 2:25 a.m. December 22, two black men entered the Perkins restaurant on Joliet Street. Shauna Lee Luckey and manager Carol Anne Quigley were working out front; they had the best view of the action. Rathbun was seated in a booth at the rear, some 25 feet from the scene.
According to witness comments made to police early that morning, the taller man, who was wearing some kind of mask, yelled for everyone to get down, then ordered Luckey to "give me all the money now." Taking the entire cash drawer, he and his companion left. All told, they stole $857.35 in cash, coins and checks.
Young was back on the job Monday. Although none of the other workers mentioned the robbery, Perkins's second black employee, Durenda Nash, told him all about it. "She told me that the night after they got robbed that they accused her, her friends, of doing it," Young recalls. "A manager asked her, 'Did your friends do it?' and she told me, 'You should watch your back.' And then I was like, 'Why?' and she said, 'Because you're black.'"
Still, Young says he didn't give the matter another thought. "As far as the robbery, I never even considered that they would think it was me," he says.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and Young was again running late. He called work to say he'd be there as soon as he could. When he showed up thirty minutes late, La Rue called him into his office and fired him. "I was like, all right," Young says. "I'm not gonna sit here and beg nobody for no job. I just let it go. I knew Neil didn't like me."
On his way out, though, Young says he spoke with Quigley and the kitchen manager, and they both told him to call in a week to see about getting his job back. He left feeling optimistic. "I felt that I'd probably be back up there in a week or so," he says. "I was pretty sure they could get me back on."
But he didn't hear from Perkins again.
Two months later, on February 27, the Denver cops stopped Young and a buddy, Robbi Washington, because "we looked like gang members," Young says. "That was their excuse."
But they had reason for holding Young: He was a suspect in the robbery of a Perkins restaurant in Arapahoe County. Three employees there--his former co-workers--had identified him as the man who'd helped rob the restaurant.
Young spent a night in the Denver jail, then was transferred to Arapahoe County. "I'm calling everybody, trying to let them know they made a mistake," he says. "They got the wrong person. I don't know where they got my name from."
He thought the mistake would be cleared up quickly, he adds. "Little did I know a simple mistake was gonna take me eight months."
Young was charged with two counts of aggravated robbery, conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery and felony theft. His bond was set at $50,000, a standard figure for that crime in Arapahoe County.
When Young learned that Luckey, Rathbun and Quigley had told cops that they thought he might have committed the crime, he was stunned. "I couldn't believe that they would do this to me," he says. "I worked my butt off for them. I got along with everybody. And they would sit there and accuse me of something as stupid as this?"
After he'd been in jail two months, Young's public defender, Gina Shimeall, arranged a polygraph test to try to get the case dismissed or the bond lowered. According to court documents, Young passed the test easily. But his bond remained at $50,000 and he stayed behind bars.
Prison was eating him up. Young describes it as "a really scary feeling. 'Cause you don't know how your future is gonna turn out. You never know if they'll believe you or not. It's total confusion."
In July, Deputy District Attorney J.Y. Kang ordered another polygraph test. This time the results were inconclusive as to whether Young had committed the robbery.
But on that second test, Young admitted he was no saint. Asked to reveal things he'd done that he'd never gotten caught for, Young said that five years earlier he'd broken into a Park Hill home and stolen a television set and a stereo. He also confessed to breaking into a house in Commerce City and stealing a television. As a teenager, he added, he'd broken into cars.
Those admissions were included in documents provided to Westword by Perkins attorneys. When asked about the incidents, Young admits to all of them.
"Basically, I told the truth," Young says. "It's a lie-detector test. They asked me to tell the truth, and that's what I did. I've done stuff in the past that I wasn't proud of. I was young, and I did a lot of things that were bad."
For example, there was the time he had sex with a resident of Triad House while he was working there as a youth counselor. "When I looked at Triad, I was just fresh startin' out," Young says. "I had just become a counselor, and I was only nineteen. I had just stopped hanging around most of the guys, because I had finally got a good job.
"The girl that I slept with was sixteen," he continues. "I wasn't that old and she wasn't that old."
According to the results of the lie-detector test, Young said the girl was developmentally disabled. But Young says that was a mistake on the part of the polygraph examiner. None of the kids at Triad were retarded, he explains; he thinks that the confusion may stem from the fact that he worked with handicapped kids at the Martin Luther King Home after he lost his job at Triad--because his auto insurance expired, he says.
After the second lie-detector test, Young's bond remained at $50,000. But now the DA's office offered a deal: Plead guilty and receive a ten-year sentence.
"I was mad; I was scared," Young says. "To be in an all-white county, and 90 percent of the people there get convicted. Everybody is saying, Take the deal, you can't win in this county."
But Young, remembering his cocaine bust, refused the deal. "They was like, either take the two years now, or we'll try to give you twenty," he says of his 1994 plea. "They really scared me, so I took the two years. I'm not gonna do another ten years for something I didn't do.
"That's when I realized they're really trying to hang me," he adds. "The public defender wasn't trying to help; they get a flat fee, regardless if you get found guilty or not guilty. I'm not gonna put myself on the line for somebody that's not gonna really try. 'Cause I was lookin' at a lot of time for something I didn't do."
Young dismissed Shimeall (who did not return several phone calls from Westword). Four weeks before the trial, his family brought in attorney Scott Baroway.
Devitt Young went to trial on November 4, 1997, almost eleven months after the Perkins robbery.
"What was clearly demonstrated during the trial was that the witnesses' recollections became clearer and clearer," says Baroway. In the beginning, "no one indicated they had any suspicion it was Mr. Young. By the time the trial was on, they were certain it was him."
On December 22, right after the robbery, none of the witnesses told police they suspected Young might have been involved. Nor did they mention him in personal statements regarding the incident that they wrote for Perkins.
Rathbun tried to explain why during her testimony at trial: "I would have been real uncomfortable if I was the only one that suspected him and I still had to have a work relationship with him," she said.
During her testimony at trial, Quigley said that as soon as the taller robber entered, she thought it was Young: "I was going to laugh, because I was going to say, 'What in the world are you doing here?'"
When Luckey first told police that she suspected Young, she said she'd kept quiet earlier because she'd "seen all of these programs on TV about suspects retaliating against witnesses and they were both afraid."
In court, though, Luckey denied that television had anything to do with her silence, instead providing another explanation: "I'm not going to submit, you know, information that I was not asked to give," she said.
"They all knew him, they seemed fairly friendly toward him, well-disposed toward him," said Aurora police detective John Callahan in an affidavit dated February 18, 1997. "One of the reasons they didn't come forward immediately was the fact he was a friend. I didn't sense anyone had an axe to grind."
Why would Young rob a place and show up for work a day later?
"You'd be surprised," says Callahan. "A lot of these people are so arrogant, they think they can't be caught. A lot of times they want to see what the reaction is when they come back."
At the trial, Rathbun and Luckey both testified that Young acted "nervous" when he returned to work. "He wouldn't look at me, he wouldn't talk to me, and I got a really weird feeling around him," Luckey said.
Young wouldn't look her in the eye that Monday, Rathbun testified, which seemed unusual, because they were "friends."
Although all three witnesses now said they were certain Young had robbed the restaurant, contradictions in their testimony emerged. At trial, Luckey said she'd looked at the robber as he led her to the cash drawer; at an April hearing, she'd said she didn't get a good look at him because she was "just paying attention to where I was walking." At trial, Quigley testified she'd recognized Young's voice; in April she'd said she didn't. And while Rathbun had said she wasn't sure about the voice at a hearing a few weeks earlier, she, too, now said she recognized it as Young's.
The women's testimony was also inconsistent regarding what the robbers had worn. Quigley claimed the taller man wore a ski mask with holes for the eyes and mouth, while Luckey remembered an "ear warmer" with the Broncos logo on it. Rathbun says that robber wore a bandanna.
"There were so many different stories," Young says. "I figured the DA, the judge, everybody would see that they don't know what they're talking about."
The jurors certainly noticed the discrepancies. "When he walked in, they couldn't remember what he said," Butterfield says. "Two people said he went out one door. Someone else said he went out another door."
Of all the witnesses, Rathbun was the most insistent that Young had been involved. Yet she was also the one who was 25 feet away, farthest from the action. "There's a waitress sitting clear to hell and gone in back of the restaurant, and she was adamant it was him," Butterfield says. "She was farthest away, it wasn't a straight shot, and in cross examination, she wouldn't give."
The jurors--eleven whites and one Latino--deliberated for four hours. "They never really had a motive," says Butterfield. "He worked consistently, got a regular paycheck. He wasn't in debt, not using drugs. He didn't seem to have an impelling need to rob the restaurant he worked in."
"It was essentially just a three-witness case," says deputy DA Kang. "Juries want more than that. There was one who was not as definite as the other two."
About half the jurors thought Young was innocent; the other half thought he might be guilty, but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. Just two, Butterfield says, were convinced that Young was involved. "They had no reason," he says. "It was scary. They were adamant. We sat there for four hours trying to convince them."
Ultimately, they did. After the jurors came back with their not-guilty verdict, Young was finally released--after eight months behind bars.
"I was a little incensed that he was held in jail all that time, then they set him on the step and said, 'You're free,'" says Butterfield. "I thought that was wrong."
Did Devitt Young rob Perkins?
His girlfriend gasps at the question, but Young quickly responds. "It's a fair question," he says. "No, I didn't.
Young's problems did not end with his acquittal. While in jail, he defaulted on his child-support payments. He's behind in his bills, his phone has been cut off, and he's living check to check. He's just started a second job as a hotel chef and is putting in sixteen-hour days. On this, his day off, he's sitting in the Montbello apartment he shares with Shanell Duran, and he looks tired. He should: Eight children, his and hers by various partners, roam the place.
In February, Young filed suit against Perkins, claiming that the Perkins witnesses had slandered him and demanding $1,000 for every one of the 250 days he spent in jail.
Young's current attorney, Scott Evans, plans to amend the complaint to include charges of racial discrimination.
"There's different types of racism," Young says, "and some people don't show it and probably never will. And nine times out of ten they won't admit it. But if you're black, you know when someone doesn't like you."
The fact that all three co-workers ID'd him as a suspect proves that the restaurant's environment was racially hostile, he claims.
"You say a black person robbed you," Young says. "You don't know what he looks like. All you've seen is his eyes. But there's a black guy in your kitchen. Out of all the people, you pick the black guy in your kitchen: 'He robbed us.' And yet you sit there and say, 'He was a great guy. We got along with him.' Yet he was so great, you accused him of robbing you. And in reality, you don't know who robbed you. And that's the worst kind of racism, the kind that you won't admit."
But Bill Kenny, president of Vista Restaurants, the company that runs Denver's twelve Perkins outlets, denies that racism was involved in Young's arrest.
"I don't doubt that those sorts of things are out there," he says, "but I don't believe there's racial animus at that restaurant."
Two months after Young filed suit, the Mt. Gilead group went public with their accusations of racism at the Perkins on Joliet.
There's no connection between the two, Kenny says: "They're two situations a year and a half removed from each other."
Young sees a connection, though: Rathbun. "Rathbun would step on anybody to get to the top," he says.
How did ID-ing him as a robber help her?
"Example: She's manager now," Young says. "Then she turned around and did this to the church people. That did not surprise me at all. I totally believed that she could do that."
But Kenny, who talked with Rathbun for two hours shortly after the Mt. Gilead incident, says, "I didn't see someone who I thought had racial animus. I was quite convinced this is not somebody who is racially prejudiced."
While Kenny admits Perkins "certainly didn't do a good job, we could have done a better job" in connection with the Mt. Gilead group, "there's nothing racial about it," he says. "Had they called, we would not only have apologized, we would have invited the group back for dinner. We weren't given that opportunity."
Instead, the churchgoers went public.
"I felt ambushed by this group," says Perkins spokesman Rob Schmidt. "I was not made aware that they had a problem. They said it was our responsibility to seek them out. We had no idea who they were."
Today the two sides are still talking, according to Rich Gabriel, a lawyer for Perkins; lawyers for both Perkins and the church have asked their clients not to speak with reporters. None of the churchgoers contacted by Westword would agree to an interview, nor would any Perkins employees, including Luckey, Rathbun and Quigley.
But in the May issue of Body of Christ News, a local black religious publication, Mt. Gilead member Michelle Wheeler did speak out. "What I would like to see happen," she said, "is that each of us deserves a public apology from the woman who was so rude to us. There was no reason for her arrogance and blatant disregard of our feelings."
While the churchgoers may still get their apology, Young isn't holding his breath.
Perkins attorneys have already filed a motion to dismiss Young's suit, claiming that testimony in court by witnesses should be protected from slander charges.
"All we did was call the police after we had been robbed at gunpoint," says Kenny. "On its own legs, the Devitt Young thing is absolutely amazing. That this individual, with his background, would come forth and accuse us now."
But if he didn't have that background, Young might never have been suspected, Butterfield points out. "He was there because he was poor and lacked education and his lifestyle was messed up," the jury foreman says. "I don't think he lacked intelligence. He just made a lot of dumb decisions.
