The mum of a man held in the shooting of a New York City McDonald’s worker over cold fries says that her son told her he did what he had to do.
Lisa Fulmore, 40, revealed her 20-year-old son’s chilling comments to the New York Post while describing exactly what led up to Monday night’s shooting that left a 23-year-old fast-food employee clinging to life.
“I talked to my son with the cops. My son is just saying that he gotta do what he gotta do and the [victim] came after him and whatever happened, happened,” she said.
The mother of three boys said the incident unfolded after she ordered McDonald’s on her mobile app and went to the Bedford-Stuyvesant eatery in Brooklyn around 7pm to pick up her food, which included fries.
“The fries were cold,” Fulmore said. “I asked the girl to change the French fries because the fries were cold. She went to the French fry machine for maybe 10 seconds and brought back fries, so I thought they were new fries, so I had left.
“So I taste the fries, and after I got to the third one, it was a cold fry still. So I went back to take the food back.
“I asked her, ‘Why would you give me the same fries and just put one or two on top to make me think that you gave me new fries?’ She started laughing, and all of them started laughing, acting like it’s funny,” Fulmore said.
“I was like, ‘What’s funny? I paid for food and I should get what I asked for.’ They laughed at me.
“One of them was like, ‘All of this over fries?’ So now I’m arguing with them back and forth.”
Referring to the worker who was later shot, Fulmore said: “The boy where they cook the food at was like, ‘You got all this food in your teeth.’
“So I said, ‘You wanna take it out? You’re saying I got all this food in my teeth, you wanna take it out?’”
Fulmore said she asked to speak to their boss and the workers said the manager had stepped out.
“Everybody started laughing again,” she said.
“This is when I was on the phone with my son. I was like, ‘They in this McDonald’s playing with me.’ I was like, I got kids their age, I’m not going to sit here and keep arguing with these little kids. He was like, ‘I’m coming down the block.’
“I was like, ‘Alright.’ … Then I told him, ‘No, don’t come to McDonald’s because I don’t want you to get in trouble.’”
But she said her son was already at the restaurant.
“He was like, ‘I’m coming in.’ So I came in. I heard them saying stuff to me, so he was like, ‘You all gotta back off my mother.’
Again referring to the worker later shot, Fulmore said: “My son said, ‘come outside’ to the boy in the back.”
The employee did not exit the restaurant at that point and Fulmore said she then told her son to just leave “because I didn’t want him to get in trouble”.
“So I’m thinking my son was gone,” she said. “I’m thinking it was over because my son left the store.”
According to Fulmore, 10 or 15 minutes later the male worker came over to her asking: “Where your son at?”
She said she told him her son left and to mind his own business.
“He went looking for my son,” she said. “The next thing you know, maybe like 10 minutes later, you hear a gunshot. So I ran to the door. I said, ‘Who’s shooting?’”
She said someone replied, “Your son.”
“I looked, and I saw a boy on the ground, and then I saw my son running the other way. I called 911 and then I sat there and waited.”
When asked if her son had a gun, Fulmore said she didn’t know, adding, “I don’t even know if my son did that,” referring to the shooting.
“The only thing I know is that my son was arguing with the boy and the boy did go out looking for my son.”
She said the victim changed his shirt at one point, “and he had something under the blue shirt, that’s why he put the big blue shirt on”.
Law-enforcement sources said the victim had no prior arrests and there was no indication he was carrying a weapon when he was killed.
But Fulmore, referring to the critically injured worker, said: “There was no reason for him to go outside looking for somebody. Whatever happened outside, you caused that to happen.”
Fulmore’s son is in police custody but has not been charged in the shooting.
He has been previously arrested several times, including for grand larceny in 2019 and assault and theft of service in 2018, police sources said. He also has numerous sealed arrest cases, they said.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Kate Sheehy
This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission
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