Young Parents Talk About Viral Video Of Shopper Hassling Them For Tapping Food Assistance
(CBS) -- A Glendale Heights family is talking for the first time about how their shopping trip turned into a viral video.
CBS 2's Sandra Torres reports.
Twenty-one-year-old Ricky Fuentes found himself being harassed at a Walmart in the western suburbs for using a WIC card. A shopper behind him in the checkout lane started hassling him.
"I put in 50 to 60 hours trying to provide for my family," Fuentes tells the unidentified woman, in a video that has gone viral on YouTube.
"You're not providing for it – I am," the woman snaps. "The government is. They take it out of my check."
Fuentes says the woman called him a "scumbag" and "lowlife."
"She asked me if I'd at least married her before I knocked her up," Fuentes said, referring to his wife, Brenda.
Angry at the hostile woman, he uses expletives to tell her to mind her own business.
What the woman didn't know is that Fuentes and his wife both work full-time jobs. They say they're doing the best they can with limited income. WIC – short for Women, Infants and Children – provides assistance for their growing family.
"We are 20, 21 years old. We have our own apartment, our kids have their own room, we really try to give our kids the best life," Brenda Fuentes says.
Ricky Fuentes says he regrets swearing at the woman in the heat of the moment but hopes the images serve as a lesson.
"I hope she learns from this and doesn't judge people the way she judged me," he says.
Even though the woman has been identified on social media, CBS 2 could not confirm her identity. Meanwhile, the Fuentes family has received overwhelming support from many who viewed the video, including hundreds of dollars in donations.
