Racial Incident Becomes 'Teachable Moment' For Homewood Mom, Kids

HOMEWOOD, IL — When Vernita Becton and her family pulled up to a drive-up ATM at an Indiana branch of a PNC bank earlier this week, she couldn’t get over the size of the smiles plastered across the faces of her two boys.

After all, the two Homewood youngsters were prepared to deposit $300 of earnings from their lemonade stand and dog-walking business into a bank account Becton and her husband had set up for the boys. After being deposited into the bank, the money would then be transferred into a brokerage account to give the boys — ages 12 and 9— as way of providing a first-hand lesson in personal investment strategy to the young business owners.

But the lesson Becton had hoped to teach her boys quickly changed when a Munster, Ind., police car pulled up to the family’s car Wednesday night. Uncertain of why an officer was asking why the family was there, Becton said she soon learned that a bank employee had called police to report that someone had been at the bank's ATM for more than 10 minutes and looked suspicious and was making her feel uncomfortable, Becton told Patch on Friday.

What was meant to have been a happy occasion celebrating the rewards of hard work quickly tuned into something much different.

“I had a lot of emotions mixed in in one moment,” an emotional Becton told Patch in a telephone interview on Friday. “I was infuriated after, but in that moment, I turned my kids’ head and told them to ignore it and said, ‘We’re going to finish doing what we’re doing.’

“I really could not share my feelings because I was in the car with my kids. But I was very frustrated, very upset because I know that things like this happen. But to experience it still evokes emotions you don’t feel until you’re in the moment. I’m a Black woman and so I have experienced racial things toward me, but not with my kids.”

The incident took place at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday after Becton finished work at a local breast imaging cancer center. Becton said that she had stepped out of the car with her sons to show them how to deposit cash into the ATM. She said that someone who Becton described as a Caucasian woman pulled up in a car behind them and then pulled around them, gave her a look, and then drove off.

A short time later, the police arrived to inform Becton that someone had called to report the “suspicious” activity. The officer said that the cleaning woman in the bank had called to say she felt uncomfortable with the family’s presence. The officer then asked Becton’s husband, Dawaun, to step out of the car, which he refused to do. The officer then, according to Becton, asked her husband for his identification, a request he also declined.

The officer then said he was merely asking for Dawaun Becton's identification — not requiring it, which prompted Becton’s husband to comply with the officer’s request. After reviewing the information and asking what kind of businesses the two boys ran, the officer released the family, but not before the incident had made a profound effect.

On Monday, a PNC spokesperson contacted Patch with the following statement from the bank:

"Upon learning of this incident, bank leadership immediately began looking further into it, and our review determined that no individual affiliated with PNC contacted the police about this customer’s visit to the ATM," the statement reads. "We regret that this unfortunate situation occurred at our branch location. PNC is committed to financial education and we encourage Ms. Becton and all families to continue teaching their children about the importance of saving money."

Becton’s 9-year-old son, Desean, runs a lemonade stand in the family’s driveway on Homewood Street near 186th near Willow School along with his 12-year-old brother, Dawuan, who also walks dogs in the family’s neighborhood to make money.

For a total stranger to ruin the moment of them depositing their earnings into the bank stings and likely will for some time, Becton said.

“They had the biggest smiles in life on their face and when that police came, it was a different story,” Becton said. “The smiles went off their faces and (the bank employee) stole that from them.”

Becton said she was wearing her work scrubs and still can’t fathom how her presence at the bank’s ATM would make someone feel uncomfortable. Becton said she struggles to understand why the bank employee would call the police without taking into consideration how it could affect the family.

“I’ve talked to my kids about certain things but had to have a conversation in that moment I was forced to have that I wasn’t prepared to have my kids,” Becton said. “For every action, there is a reaction, but I want to teach my kids that there is a proper way to respond because this is not the last time they are going to experience something like this unfortunately.

“So, when it happened, it became a teachable moment to show them that this is the way I’m raising you to handle this.”

On Saturday, Becton plans to return to the PNC branch in Munster to meet with bank management and to discuss the incident and to ask about consequences for the bank employee. If the matter is not resolved to her satisfaction, she said she plans to close out her account with PNC and take her banking elsewhere.

Since Wednesday, Becton said she and her family have received an outpouring of support after news of the incident made it into the feeds of several community social media posts. Community members have called for local residents to support Desean's lemonade stand as a way of helping to rectify what happened to the family at the ATM on Wednesday night.

Becton said she is hoping that some of the joy of what was supposed to be such a positive experience can somehow be restored. While she isn’t sure of what shape that process will take, Becton hopes to make it another teachable moment for her boys.

“I don’t want their spirits to be crushed and not change anything about them because of how someone else feels,” she told Patch.

“But even though we went through what we went through, there’s obviously more good than bad. Even though bad people can be influential and can make things hard and even though what happened to us was bad, there has been much more support that we’ve gotten.”