A barista at a Starbucks store in Texas noticed a teen girl was being harassed by a male stranger and decided to step in to help her. Brandy Roberson, the mom of the 18-year-old who was approached by the man, shared the story on her Facebook page on Friday and showed a photo of the handwritten note penned on her daughter’s coffee cup offering assistance if she needed it.
“Are you okay? Do you want us to intervene? If you do, take the lid off the cup,” the Starbucks employee wrote.
Roberson said that her daughter was trying to get some studying done at a Starbucks location in Corpus Christi on Saturday night when the incident took place.
“She wanted to get out of the house and go sit and study somewhere. She likes to go study at coffee shops,” she told TODAY Food in an email. When employees noticed that a man the teenager didn’t know began to talk to her, they handed her “an extra hot chocolate someone forgot to pick up” with the note written on the cup.
Thankfully, Roberson’s daughter was safe and didn’t need any intervention despite the man lingering for a long time and talking “fairly loudly.” Eventually, the man realized that the employees and the girl were talking about him and aware of his odd behavior and he decided to leave her alone and move on.
The teen did tell her mom about what happened when she got home, and Roberson was touched by the employees’ dedication to keeping her daughter safe.
“She was holding the cup and knew that I would love that someone did that for her,” Roberson said. “It made me feel so grateful that the Starbucks employees were watching out for her. As a mom, that is my worst fear that something would happen to my child and nobody would be there to help.”
She added that she hopes the story going viral would be a lesson to people to look out for each other more. “I am incredibly grateful to the staff there. I hope that we can all learn from them and be willing to help anyone who seems that they might need help,” she said.
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