News-Gazette Photo/ Andrew Sullivan Lindy Brown, seated at right, speaks with attorneys David Chico, far left, Kelvin Soto, center, and, facing away from camera, Charles Tiffany in the dining area of downtown Kissimmee's Joanie's Diner.

A regular customer of Joanie’s Diner in Kissimmee has accused one of the diner’s waitresses of forbidding him to sit at a particular table because he’s Puerto Rican and that it was reserved for whites only.

Lindy Brown, the waitress who goes unnamed in most reports accusing the longstanding local diner of discrimination, recalls a completely different story.

Brown said she did get into an argument with Hector Negron, a Kissimmee business owner, the morning of Jan. 10. The argument started as a debate about whether it was rude for Hispanics to speak Spanish in front of people who couldn’t understand them and escalated into an exchange of insults. But the incident was a personal argument and wasn't about racial discrimination, she said.

“He just chose to lie and blow this thing so out of proportion, that now, he’s went too far,” Brown said. “We could sue him for slander. He’s lied about this place.”

Before the incident in January, Negron had been a regular of Joanie’s Diner for a few years, Brown said. He usually came in the mornings just for coffee and always sat at the bar, at a particular stool where he could lean his back against the wall.

On the Sunday morning in question, Negron came in early, just after 6 a.m., before the diner opened at 8 a.m., Brown said. He came through the back door, and she agreed to serve him coffee while she set up the restaurant.

Brown

Later, when the restaurant was open, Brown commented in passing that she agreed with another Hispanic man who said it was rude for Spanish-speakers to speak the language when others couldn’t understand them. Negron began arguing with her, saying white Americans were lazy people, leaving the better jobs to Hispanics who could speak two languages, Brown said.

“He pointed his finger at me and he said, ‘That’s why people like you only can get substandard jobs like a waitress,’ ” Brown recalled. 

Offended by more than his demeaning attitude, Brown said she called him an explicit name and refused to pour him any more coffee. When Negron demanded coffee later, Brown went to Jim Peeples, the owner of the diner, and asked for his intervention.

“It’s him or me,” she said, still outraged.

Peeples told Negron that he purposely was causing trouble and asked that he calm down or leave.

Still, Negron sat at his favorite stool in the diner for another hour before he left, through the front door, and without paying for his coffee, Brown said. She said she didn’t think too much about the argument. She said she certainly didn’t anticipate accusations of discrimination against her almost four months later.

“If he had come in three or four days later, and sat back down in the seat he always sits in, I would have served him coffee,” she said.

Negron’s accusations, circulated in the media and repeated by local Hispanic activists recently, claim that Joanie’s Diner didn’t let him sit at a back table, called him a racial slur and made him leave through the back door. The table in question, known as the “Liar’s Table,” is a long table along a side wall of Joanie’s, known to be a favorite for local old-timers who swap tales of the old days every morning.

Brown said Negron has never once approached the table.

“We never, ever told him, or anybody else, he can’t sit there,” she said. “He never attempted to sit at that back table.”

At around 9:30 a.m. that morning, Negron showed up Kissimmee Police Department to file a complaint about the restaurant. He told Officer Jeff Hanna that he was refused service and told no Puerto Ricans could sit at the back table because it was “grandfathered in,” according to the police report. Hanna advised him to speak with a lawyer, explaining his complaint was a civil matter.

Negron returned to the department on Jan. 13 to file a complaint against Hanna, who he accused of advising Joanie’s Diner about the filed accusations against the restaurant. He knew Hanna was a daily customer of the eatery, he said.

Brown contends that Joanie’s Diner wouldn’t be in business if they turned away Hispanics, who make up more than half of their customers.

David Chico is a Kissimmee lawyer, Puerto Rican and weekly customer at Joanie’s.

“I just don’t believe the allegations,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for a long time. It just sounds like BS to me, based on the people I know here. It seems to purport with common sense and how things happen in life.”

He said that in a day when Kissimmee residents are starting to get used to the changing population dynamics, such accusations of discrimination are detrimental.

“I would just hate for these allegations to grow in a way that, for me, kind of sets back progress instead of advancing it,” he said. “I just don’t know how this is helpful at all.”

The activists who began circulating the accusations late last week point to a polygraph test for which Negron volunteered. The test, conducted on Saturday by a retired Orange County Sheriff’s Office detective, reported that Negron was not lying when he responded “no” to four questions about his account of the incident, including “Did you lie about the waitress telling you that the table was reserved for white people?”

Several people complained about the discrimination at Joanie’s Diner during the city commissioners’ meeting Tuesday, calling for the city to revoke the restaurant’s business license.

“Last night, I called the complainant, and I conducted an interview, a lengthy interview, that was trying to ascertain the truth,” activist Armando Ramirez told the commission. “I would like to know what efforts the city of Kissimmee has done so far to get to the bottom of these serious allegations.”

City Manager Mark Durbin assured the commission that the police department was conducting its own internal investigation to determine if its officers handled Negron’s complaints properly. The city, however, can’t do anything about the status of Joanie’s Diner as a business. Several years ago, state legislation changed the standard business license to a business tax as a way to keep local governments from regulating businesses within their jurisdiction, Durbin explained.

The police report detailing Negron’s complaint against Hanna stated that Negron paused before he left to say that he wasn’t sorry for Officer Thomas Bartholomew, the department’s only officer killed in the line of duty and who is memorialized on the lobby wall. He told the officer to whom he had filed his complaint that he places a star on his calendar every time an officer is killed or injured because they “must have done something during their career to deserve what happened to them.”