BY BOB MIMS THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

For a Roosevelt teenager, it started out as a banner day. It was her 18th birthday, the first hour of the first day on her first job.

Then, she says, came a bogus accusation of theft and a subsequent two-hour nightmare. Her U.S. District Court lawsuit claims the teen was strip-searched, forced into prurient poses and ordered to jog in place, naked, in front of two managers at the eastern Utah town's McDonald's Restaurant.

"It is amazing, it is outrageous. It is hard to believe this happened, but it is a real case," the woman's Salt Lake City attorney, Robert H. Wilde, said Thursday.

The suit contends the woman's ordeal began when someone, identifying himself as a McDonald's district manager, called the Roosevelt restaurant to report a little girl's coin purse had been stolen and the plaintiff was a suspect.

During the next two hours, two managers on duty at the time -- one male, one female -- purportedly followed the caller's instructions to at first "pat search" the woman, then search her car and then strip-search her.

The suit contends that while the strip-search was conducted in an office, the space was open to the sight of other employees and even to people passing by the restaurant's drive-up window.

The coin purse was never found, and the caller was later determined to have been perpetrating a hoax -- one allegedly similar to calls to other McDonald's restaurants prompting managers to search female employees,
the suit states.

The woman, humiliated, quit her job immediately after the incident, Wilde said.

"This wacko [the caller] is still out there somewhere," he said. "It's not like the industry is not aware of this kind of thing."
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---> Earlier post: Teen sues Burger King because of strip search