The popular fitness tracking app Strava has fired an employee who was arrested after being filmed drunkenly attacking staff in a San Francisco restaurant when they reportedly refused to serve her.
The woman, named by the San Francisco Police Department as Shireen Afkari, worked as a senior manager of growth marketing and retention at Strava, according to her now-deleted LinkedIn page.
In a video posted to TikTok by staff at Hazie’s – an upmarket restaurant in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley – Afkari is seen verbally and physically assaulting restaurant staff before she was eventually ejected along with a man also involved in the altercation.
In a statement on Instagram on Wednesday, Strava said: “We are aware of an employee who exhibited extremely concerning off-hours behavior. We don’t condone violence of any kind and this does not reflect the standards we expect of our team.
“This past Monday, we made the decision to end the individual’s employment.”
Speaking to San Francisco’s KRON4, Miguel Marchese, a bartender at Hazie’s, who was at the centre of the ordeal, said the couple came in at around 9 pm and staff rapidly raised concerns about their level of intoxication.
“The night was quite chaotic, the couple came in, they were requesting dinner service,” Marchese said.
“Initially, the server verbalized to me that she could tell that her table was not only intoxicated, but perhaps on some other substances and they were giving her quite a rough time and being quite verbally abrasive with her and then I do believe after that [the server] asked for the manager to intervene.”
Marchese said the manager then removed cocktails from the couple’s table and asked them to leave.
“He retracts her cocktails from the table, because I just made them, he brings them back and he simply tells me, ‘they’ve had enough to drink, we shouldn’t serve them anymore.’ And then later, it just kind of spiraled into chaos,” he said.
The video, which has gone viral worldwide, initially shows Afkari at the restaurant’s bar, holding her phone aloft and yelling, swearing, and slurring at employees, who plead with her to leave.
She taunts the staff, saying “ooooh,” and accuses one of being “a liar” and a “motherf*****”.
At this point, she spots the camera filming her and lunges towards it, hitting it.
The point of view – in the uploaded video – then shifts to another camera, and viewers can see this part of the altercation from another perspective in which Afkari appears to attack the man – identified by KRON4 as an employee, suddenly drawing even more attention from stunned diners around the room.
As the man she is with appears to direct her toward the door, a staff member pushes Afkari to the floor with a thud.
Afkari then gets back up and starts flailing towards other members of the restaurant’s staff, crashing into a woman and charging back toward the dining area, where a large table of people, apparently having a Christmas dinner, is seated.
Several people first grab the man, who is also resisting, then Afkari, and bundle them out through the doors and into the night, to whoops and cheers from the other diners.
But the fresh air does little to halt the chaos, as the video shows Afkari bucking and kicking at Marchese and eventually grabbing onto his hair and refusing to let go as the group moves down the street away from the restaurant’s entrance. Meanwhile, the man is being held in a headlock.
“She wraps my hair around her hand and just pulls on it for dear life. It was quite painful,” Marchese explained, adding that she only let go when he took her phone out of her hands.
After throwing her phone to distract her and get her away from the restaurant, “like throwing a bone at a dog that’s attacking you,” the woman then runs back towards Marchese and the restaurant entrance.
The extraordinary scene reaches its climax as a man sticks his foot out, tripping the woman, who falls heavily to the ground, and then gets up while appearing to berate her partner.
“She gets back up [and] she yells at her boyfriend that he’s not man enough,” Marchese said, with the video showing the man half-heartedly begin to start shoving more staff members.
Finally, the police arrived. She was taken to the San Francisco County Jail and detained for public intoxication.
“People who work in hospitality go through a lot,” Marchese said. “I’ve been spat on, I’ve been slapped at a bar before, homophobic slurs, been sexualized by guests. It just happens and, you know, you gotta move on.”
