Not long after she stopped for gas, Rose Wakefield wondered why no one was filling up her car.
When she noticed that she was being ignored by a gas station attendant in Beaverton, Ore., who was servicing other cars that arrived at Jacksons Food Store after her, Wakefield asked why he wouldn’t pump her gas, according to court documents. It was only after Wakefield got someone else to fill up her car in March 2020 that the Black woman got a straight answer from the attendant.
“I don’t serve Black people,” said the man, according to a lawsuit filed by Wakefield. The man, identified in records as 23-year-old Nigel Powers, then allegedly laughed at the 63-year-old Wakefield as she drove away. Powers is White.
Nearly three years after the alleged incident, a jury concluded this week that Wakefield was racially discriminated against and awarded her $1 million in total damages. On Monday, a jury in Multnomah County Circuit Court awarded $450,000 to Wakefield for discrimination and ordered Jacksons Food Store and PacWest Energy, the local gas station operator, to pay $330,000 and $220,000 in damages, respectively.
“I wasn’t served. I was actually humiliated and disrespected,” Wakefield told KGW in Portland, Ore. “It was like, ‘What world am I living in?’ This is not supposed to go down like that. It was a terrible, terrible confrontation between me and this guy.”
Greg Kafoury, one of the attorneys representing Wakefield, told The Washington Post that he pushed for a large damages sum because a $1 million award forced the defendants to explain how the situation was handled. Kafoury accused the defendants of not recording complaint calls made by Wakefield after the incident, and alleged that a voice mail she left was erased.
“The message the jury sent is that big corporations should take big racist complaints seriously,” Jason Kafoury, Greg Kafoury’s son and another attorney representing Wakefield, told The Post. “They need to document them and investigate them and not sweep them under the rug. If they don’t do that, juries are going to make them pay — and that’s what this one did.”