NAACP members are suing an international hotel chain over a norovirus outbreak that sickened 127 people — everyone who ate the salmon — at the NAACP’s annual California conference at the upscale Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City in 2014.
Civil rights attorney John Burris, one of the conference attendees who didn’t eat the fish, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, on the two-year anniversary of the Oct. 25, 2014 gala of around 300 black dignitaries, community leaders and youth. Attendants described brunch the next morning as a “humiliating” “horror scene” with NAACP members age 5 to 80 getting violently ill in the hotel lobby while hotel staff ignored them and provided no aid.
A spokesperson for Sofitel Corporation could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
California NAACP President and conference organizer Alice Huffman said the members were treated “like dogs” by hotel staff.
“I get very sad when I think about what happened to our people and then I get very annoyed at the hotel and the indifference that they showed us,” said Huffman, who said she had enough problems with the hotel before the conference to make her wonder if race was an issue.
Former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, who said he was in a coma for two days after being struck by the virus, was among more than three dozen attendees who were hospitalized.