Worcester George Floyd Store A Coincidence Amid Tragedy

WORCESTER, MA — There's a store in Worcester that shares a name with George Floyd, who died May 25 after a police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly 9 minutes. The name crossover is a strange coincidence amid a national uprising over police brutality — and the man who founded the store sees important parallels between recent protests and the country he emigrated from.

The founding of the George Floyd Mini Mart along Millbury Street in Worcester can be traced back to northern Syria in the mid-1990s. George Kentar was deeply into music and would visit a store called Floyd Cassettes to buy albums. He liked the word "Floyd" and asked the owner where the word came from. That's how he found out about a band called Pink Floyd.

Soon after, Kentar opened his own convenience store in a room off of an apartment he was renting in the Syrian city of Qamishli. He named the store George Floyd, a combination of his first name and the band he loved. He worked full-time selling ice cream and cigarettes to locals and devoted a lot of time to playing music in local bands.

In 2002, Kentar and his band was invited to play in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. It was his first trip to the United States.

"When I saw America, I was impressed," he remembered this week. "I thought, 'that's a big country.'"

At the time, Kentar had a lot of family living in Worcester. His uncle came here in the 1970s to go to school, and family members have been coming ever since. Kentar came back to the U.S. in 2003 and joined his family in Worcester.

Kentar didn't speak much English at first and worked more than full-time at a convenience store and as an electrician. He remembers being welcomed by local residents. In particular, one woman, a regular at the Sunny Farms he worked at in Quinsigamond Village, pledged to help him learn two new English words every day.

After seven years of working multiple jobs, he saved up enough to start his own store. One day in 2010 on the way home from that Sunny Farms job, he saw a vacant commercial space along Millbury Street at the edge of Vernon Hill.

Soon after, he opened his second George Floyd Mini Mart.

Kentar doesn't have great memories of the store. For a long time, he slept in the store's bathroom after he lost his apartment. He worked 80 hours a week and didn't make much money. He was constantly stressed out over theft; thieves took $4,000 worth of cigarettes in a nighttime burglary.

"I put my blood into the store," he said.

He sold it in 2017, and the new owner hasn't changed the name. Kentar now owns Papa George's Pizza along June Street. He still works 80 hours a week, but he's confident it will get easier (the name of the pizza shop is another coincidence — Kentar says he didn't go seeking another business bearing his name).

"It's like a book," he said. "You flip the pages, and after a while you move forward."

Kentar works so much, he says, he doesn't have time to pay attention to politics. But it's almost impossible to miss news about the George Floyd from Minneapolis and the protests. Several peaceful demonstrations have been held in Worcester, but police fought with demonstrators in the Main South neighborhood late at night June 1.

The protests worry him. In 2011, the Arab Spring either toppled or attempted to dethrone autocratic leaders from Morocco to Yemen. The Syrian Armed Forces met the uprising in that country against President Bashar al-Assad with brutal violence. Close to 400,000 have died, and the civil war is still going on.

He doesn't necessarily think that will happen here, but he doesn't want to get to the point where the U.S. government uses its power to crack down even more violently on the protests. Countless people have already been injured by police since protests began on May 25, including the police shooting death of Louisville restaurant owner David McAtee. In Ohio, officials are investigating whether a woman died as a result of being pepper-sprayed at a protest. On Sunday in Seattle, a man drove into a crowd of protesters and shot one of them.

"One thing I don't want to see is America, the country I love, the country that gave me everything, get destroyed," he said.

He also thinks Americans don't realize how good they have it and has faith the criminal justice system will work in response to Floyd's killing. In many other cases — with Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Philando Castile in Minnesota, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Trayvon Martin in Florida, and many others — the accused killers were never convicted, leading to deeper unrest.

When pressed to think about the situation more, he comes back to Worcester. His best employee at Papa George's is a young black woman, and he reflects on how much she means to him, at work and as a friend. He thinks about the woman who would visit him at Sunny Farms to chat and help him learn English — he's close with her today, and refers to her as "mom." She's black and her son is a state trooper.

"I hate to see anyone getting hurt," he said. "We should love our country and not destroy our country, that's my big message."