A nasty spat between two Ruby Tuesday employees left one with a slashed tire and the other unemployed and heading to court.
A 41-year-old Wildwood man who works at the eatery, located at 1168 Main Street in Spanish Springs, called Lady Lake Police on Sept. 19 after discovering that the front right tire on his Chrysler Pacifica had been cut. The vehicle was parked across the street from Ruby Tuesday in the lot behind Panera Bread near Bichara Boulevard.
The man told an officer that his 34-year-old ex-girlfriend, who also works at the restaurant, had asked him for a ride home earlier in the day and he had refused. He said they got into a verbal altercation and she became “irate.”
The man told the officer that he believed his former girlfriend could be responsible for the slashed tire, but she had already left work for the day. The officer tried to call the woman but couldn’t make contact. There also were no surveillance cameras in the area where the man’s vehicle was parked, nor any witnesses, the report says.
On Sept. 22, the officer was called to return to Ruby Tuesday and when he arrived, a manager showed him a screenshot of text messages believed to be between the victim’s ex-girlfriend and another female employee. In the text messages, the ex-girlfriend called the man a derogatory name, points out there no cameras in the Panera parking lot, using expletives to describe how he messed with wrong person and claims to have cut the tire with a knife from “RT,” which was presumed to mean Ruby Tuesday.
The officer returned to the restaurant that afternoon when the woman arrived for her shift. She was terminated, trespassed from the eatery and given a summons to appear in court, the report says.
