As tensions between protesters and the police grew last year, three officers said they’d been attacked with tainted milkshakes. They hadn’t.
To Marcus Gilliam, they are simply Officer Vanilla Shake, Officer Cherry Shake and Officer Strawberry Shake: three uniformed members of the Police Department who said the cold drinks they ordered one night last June at the Shake Shack he managed had made them sick.
With tensions high at the time between the police and protesters amid rolling demonstrations touched off by George Floyd’s killing, the officers’ complaints that the milkshakes tasted odd quickly turned to suspicion that someone had spiked them with poison, Mr. Gilliam said.
After being questioned separately at the Lower Manhattan store, Mr. Gilliam said, he and the shop’s other workers were asked to go to the local police precinct. They agreed.
“At that moment, I’m sitting here thinking I’m being charged with attempted murder,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry.”
Before the night was through, investigators determined that no one had tampered with the drinks or tried to harm the officers. But as the inquiry was unfolding, two police unions blasted out messages on social media accusing the Shake Shack workers of a targeted attack.
On Monday, Mr. Gilliam sued several defendants, including the unions, the Detectives’ Endowment Association and the Police Benevolent Association, and about 20 unnamed officers who descended on the shop that night, accusing them of false arrest and defamation.
Mr. Gilliam’s lawyer, Elliot Dolby-Shields, said he could not name the specific officers involved in the incident because the Police Department had not responded to a public information request.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Gilliam, 28, says that being interrogated for several hours and accused of putting bleach in the officers’ drinks had caused him “emotional and psychological damages and damage to his reputation.”
“It left a lingering effect,” Mr. Gilliam said in the interview.
The episode underscored the heightened defensiveness among officers and their unions, in New York and elsewhere, as protesters denounced racism in the criminal justice system and rallied to “defund the police.” A video of an officer in Georgia complaining of being afraid to eat McDonald’s food she could not see prepared went viral online around the same time.
The Police Department referred questions about Mr. Gilliam’s suit to the city’s Law Department, which said it planned to review the matter. The detectives’ union declined to comment; the Police Benevolent Association did not respond to a request for comment.
The episode, in the middle of June, began when the three officers stopped around 7:30 p.m. to pick up milkshakes at the Shake Shack in the Fulton Center after ordering them using an app, according to Mr. Gilliam’s suit.
Mr. Gilliam, a shift manager at the shop, had been at work for about three and a half hours. He said he had not thought much of it when the officers, who were in the area to monitor protests, approached him and said they had noticed that the drinks had a bitter and unusual taste.
He said he apologized and offered the officers something else from the menu, which they declined. They accepted his offer of free meal vouchers instead, Mr. Gilliam said.
“I honestly thought they just didn’t like it,” he said. “I just assumed it’s the flavor they didn’t care for.”
But about two hours after the order had come in, and as Mr. Gilliam was in the process of closing the restaurant for the night, about 20 police officers approached the front door and began to treat the location as a crime scene.
One of the officers told Mr. Gilliam that the three officers had been poisoned and that there was a suspicion that someone had added bleach to the drinks, Mr. Gilliam said.
“That’s impossible,” he recalled saying, noting that chemical products were kept far away from the kitchen.
Nonetheless, Mr. Gilliam said, the officers separated him and the other workers, told them to sit on the ground and asked Mr. Gilliam to show them how milkshakes were made. At one point during the demonstration, he said, one officer asked him, “At what point do you add the bleach?”
At the precinct, Mr. Gilliam said, two detectives questioned him for roughly two hours about who had been working where in the kitchen and which employee seemed to dislike the police most. Mr. Gilliam and the other workers were later released, and they returned to the store.
Even as the investigation was unfolding, the unions were raising the specter of police officers under assault.
“Tonight, three of our fellow officers were intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack,” the detectives’ union wrote in a message on Twitter. “Fortunately, they were not seriously harmed.”
The Police Benevolent Association posted a similar message a short time later, writing that the officers’ drinks had been intentionally spiked with “a toxic substance, believed to be bleach or a similar cleaning agent.”
The messages spread widely online, and several news organizations reported that someone might have poisoned New York City officers on purpose.
But at around 4 a.m., Rodney Harrison, the Police Department’s chief of detectives at the time and now the chief of department, wrote on Twitter that an investigation had found “no criminality” by the Shake Shack workers.
Mr. Gilliam said that when he had returned home early that morning, he immediately “broke down” and began to cry alongside his girlfriend.
“I don’t know if it was anger for being stereotyped and accused of something I didn’t do or happy that I didn’t die,” he said.
In the days after the episode, Mr. Gilliam said, threats streamed into the store, and Shake Shack stationed a security guard there. Even weeks afterward, he added, employees were being advised to change into their work clothes in the store to avoid harassment while commuting, which added to the stress he was feeling.
Shake Shack did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Gilliam no longer works for the company. He said he had left the food service business entirely.
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