Tuesday, October 6th 2015, 5:33 pm
A Claremore man claims he found something racist and disturbing inside a present meant for his kids. Now he's demanding answers from Walmart and the company that made the product.
Chris Borlandelli went to Walmart and bought a pack of iron-on patches to spruce up his kids' clothing. Inside the pack were things like smiley faces, crosses, flowers, and then there were patches he wasn’t expecting.
"I just, we couldn't believe it. We really couldn't," he said.
Borlandelli claims that, stuck behind all the sparkly, girly, pretty patches he bought for his daughters' jean jackets, was one pair of patches that did not belong.
They read “SKINHEAD” in big, bold letters. On the left hangs a British flag, and on the right the flag of England - as the Skinheads first originated in London in the late 60s.
Borlandelli was disgusted.
"Mortified,” he said. “Like I was saying, all the stuff going on nowadays, this kind of stuff, we can't have it. We just can't.”
He called Walmart's customer service line and said someone took down his name and number and told him they would look into it.
We looked into it, too.
We found a similar product for sale at the Claremore Walmart, but with different patches inside, and we couldn't see any offensive ones.
A Walmart spokesperson said they've contacted their supplier to look into Borlandelli's claim.
He said he hopes Walmart stops selling the product altogether. But even if that doesn't happen, Borlandelli said there is still one good thing to come of all this, a teaching moment about tolerance.
"They started asking, you know, 'What's the big deal?' And so I sat my boys down and told them what the big deal was, that there's a lot of hate behind that. And we don't hate. There's no reason for it," Borlandelli said.
As for the company that makes the kids' patches, the CFO said her company does not make the Skinhead patches and has no idea how they may have ended up in their product, but they will investigate the claim.
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