CVS employee fired for tackling man who allegedly attempted to rob pharmacy: 'We're not allowed to fight back'

A CVS employee’s life was spared when a man attempted to rob his place of work, but his job was not.

Zac Phillips was working at a Greenfield, Ind., CVS, where he’d been employed for five years, when a man came into the store, allegedly to rob the pharmacy.

“He showed my pharmacist a note saying, ‘This is a pharmacy robbery,'” Phillips told Indianapolis news station WISH-TV.

Phillips told WISH-TV the pharmacist walked the robber to the front of the store, where he was working.

“Then he put his hands on my pharmacist, and I was right there when it happened,” Phillips said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen from that point. But I wasn’t going to let him hurt my pharmacist.”

In a video of the Nov. 25 event, the man appears to push the pharmacist before trying to run out of the store. Phillips told Indianapolis news station WXIN the suspect was trying to leave the store with oxycodone, but Phillips and the pharmacist tackled him and held him down until police arrived.

Police arrested the 22-year-old suspect, Jagger Maupin. He faces charges including robbery, theft and resisting law enforcement, according to his arrest report. He is in custody in Hancock County Jail.

But Phillips isn’t exactly being hailed a hero. A few days after the incident, CVS fired Phillips and the pharmacist, according to WISH-TV.

It all happened so fast for Phillips. “You really don’t have time to think in these situations. It happened in a flash,” he said. “People are human. They react at things. Especially when you see someone going after someone you consider a friend, your instinct is to protect them.”

But CVS doesn’t agree. “The safety and well-being of our customers and employees is always our highest priority,” the company told Yahoo Lifestyle in a statement. “We have stringent security policies and procedures in place to prohibit actions by employees that would jeopardize their safety and the safety of others. The actions of two employees at our Greenfield store during a recent attempted robbery violated those policies and procedures by initiating a physical confrontation, which led to our decision to separate them from the company.”

But Phillips doesn’t think anyone would be worried about policy in a moment like that. “When you have a half-second to think about it, you don’t think about policy, you think about a friend’s life and who this guy might endanger if he had gotten drugs?” he explained to WISH-TV. “We’re not allowed to fight back; we’re not allowed to do anything,” Philips argued. “We’re just supposed to let them have these dangerous drugs and be on their way. They don’t value anybody; they don’t value employees; they don’t value customers. They value money,” he said of CVS.

On Facebook, Phillips, who is now unemployed, has said he is going to keep sharing the video until “something is done about this.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

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• Restaurant faces backlash for threatening to fire employee who wants to attend friend’s funeral

• Woman claims racism, scented products got her fired from her retail job

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