Some waffles with a side of weirdness, please!
Most recently, Waffle House made the news when employees were caught doing each other’s hair while prepping food — but the waffle emporium has been home to plenty of other craziness over the years. Here’s a look back at some of the madness:
No Smoking
A Mississippi man killed a Waffle House waitress in November when she asked him to put out a cigarette he was smoking inside the building.
The waitress, Julie Brightwell, was working around 1 a.m. on a Friday night when Johnny Max Mount refused to snuff out his cancer stick — and then pulled a gun out of his shirt and shot his server.
MISS. WAFFLE HOUSE WORKER SHOT AFTER TELLING CUSTOMER NOT TO SMOKE INSIDE
According to a family friend, the shooter had suffered from a brain injury 13 years prior when he was struck by a car on Christmas Eve 2002.
“He was a good person,” his friend told the Sun Herald. “He wasn’t a monster. I don’t know, something just snapped.”
The Wrong Kind of Fork
In 2014, 50-year-old Jeffery Wooten was accused of using a pitchfork to rob a Waffle House outside of Atlanta.
PITCHFORK-WIELDING MAN ROBS GEORGIA WAFFLE HOUSE
He entered the restaurant in the evening and used the farming implement to push people into a back room before grabbing the register and fleeing. On his way out, he dropped the pitchfork — and two employees chased him, grabbed it and used it to bash in his truck window as he fled.
The pitchfork-wielding pancake palace robber got away successfully, but was busted later in the month on murder charges in Tennessee.
Waffles in the Buff
In January, a woman flipped out at a Georgia Waffle House, stripping off all her clothes, breaking another woman’s nose and tossing plates around before police finally subdued — and arrested — her.
After Jennifer Nicholson went on an unexplained rampage, her arrest warrant alleged that she was in a “suspected excited delirium state,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
It’s unclear whether she was high, mentally disturbed or just really excited about the waffles.
Child Care and Waffles, All in One Place
For whatever reason, some people seem to think “Waffle House” sounds a lot like “day care” — or at least that’s what one Florida mom seemed to think when she ditched her kids at a Georgia restaurant and went drinking.
FLORIDA MOM DITCHES KIDS AT WAFFLE HOUSE, GOES TO BAR
The kids didn’t have enough cash to pay for their meals and a little after midnight they wandered out into the parking lot and started crying.
The sheriffs showed up and collared the woman on three counts of deprivation of a minor — two for her own kids, and one for another woman’s daughter she’d been watching.
Pants-less Pancake Eaters
Two South Carolina men were arrested for disorderly conduct after they refused to pull up their pants in a Waffle House restaurant.
Andrew Gehring and Donovan Johnson, both 22, got belligerent when a security guard “asked them to leave for failing to comply with his request to pull their pants up and not show their boxers,” according to the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office.
The half-pantsed pair began cursing and told police they were just college students celebrating graduation — although The Smoking Gun reported that Gehring had already been expelled from college after a prior arrest.
Not the Right Topping
In 2015, a Georgia Waffle House employee was accused of masturbating inside the restaurant.
Emmanuel Williams — who was already a registered sex offender — was fired after a co-worker allegedly caught him on camera rubbing one out.
Investigators who watched the video said that the 36-year-old was “clearly” shown spanking the monkey while facing a window, even as his co-worker threatened to post the vid online.
Williams told her he didn’t care.
Police later issued a warrant for public indecency.