Nicola, disabled infant's family reach understanding
A truce has been declared in the skirmish of Nicola Pizza and the stroller.
The famed Rehoboth Beach pizza and stromboli joint was hit with a wave of bad publicity after turning away a family with a child in an medically necessary stroller. Now, Nicola Pizza has made peace with the infant's great-grandmother, who drew attention to the incident with a Facebook post last week.
The great-grandmother, Susan Hamadock, of Rehoboth Beach; Nicola Vice President Nicholas Caggiano Jr.; and Nicola manager Kelly Munyan together authored an open letter about the incident posted to Nicola's Facebook page.
They wrote the letter "in the shared hopes to help heal a community that has been divided by this painful situation," the letter says. "All members of both families as well as staff from Nicola Pizza have received hate mail, threats and have been victims of cyber bullying. The hate has been very hard and painful for all of us."
The infant in the adaptive stroller was Colton Brown, and his parents, Matt Brown and Hannah Reese, had brought him to the Rehoboth Avenue restaurant on Aug. 4. Colton has a genetic disease, SMA type 1, that keeps him from moving most of his muscles; on rare trips out of the house, his father said in an interview, he needs medical equipment to come with him and an adaptive stroller letting him lay flat.
A hostess at Nicola for the dinner hour told Brown and Reese that the restaurant's no-stroller policy could not bend for them, and the family left without asking for a manager to intervene — embarrassed and flustered, Brown said, by how they were treated. The next day, Hamadock wrote a Facebook post criticizing Nicola for not obeying the Americans with Disabilities Act. Hamadock, Brown and Caggiano spoke to The News Journal on Aug. 5 about the incident, with Caggiano saying he would have had the family and their stroller let in if he'd known they were there.
An Aug. 6 post about it all on Nicola's Facebook page attracted more than 1,400 comments, some of them critical — but others aghast that the Caggianos, who have a family member in a wheelchair, would come under fire for failing to be sensitive to the disabled. "Your faithful customers know that this whole thing is a big misunderstanding," one commenter wrote, as she changed her online picture to an 'I support Nicola Pizza' icon.
The open letter says that "the Brown family is not promoting a boycott of Nicola Pizza and that they have no intention of suing the restaurant. The Caggiano family has reached out with a heartfelt apology, with sensitivity to the ADA (which they have always had), with the intention to protect the young hostess and to encourage all people to come to the restaurant."
Brian Hartman, a disability law expert with the Legal Aid Society in Delaware, said the ADA is crystal-clear that restaurants open to the public must make "reasonable modifications in policies and practices" to accommodate the disabled. "There's no exception in the ADA about that," Hartman said. "The establishment has a duty" to accommodate.
Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.
