Mount Pleasant’s Pita Pit seemed to be a respectable operation.

The food was good. The service was good.

But Curtis Turner, the shop’s owner, was far from respectable, and he drove the restaurant into the ground.

He went MIA on the corporate office. Last month he received notification of his numerous franchise agreement violations; he responded only with false promises, said the general counsel for the corporate office.

But contract violations are not the worst of his offenses. Turner has not paid many of his employees, many of whom are students, since mid-December, employees say.

One employee claimed to have received perpetual payment postponements. Another claimed to have tried to cash a check only to have it bounce.

Pita Pit closed Saturday when some employees ceased playing victim to Turner’s manipulative practices.

Those employees were wise to refuse to work, but their actions seem to have come too late – many employees now have months’ worth of back-pay, totaling upwards of $1,000, that they may not receive for quite some time.

It’s not that they’re to blame, though. Perhaps they should have considered legal recourse after the first month of failing to receive pay; perhaps they should have quit sooner.

But they, according to one student employee, had some level of good faith in Turner. The money should come soon, they thought.

It’s not a wildly unreasonable assumption. Besides, in a town in which many scour every business for even the chance of employment, Pita Pit did, after all, provide work – a payment deferral is no good reason to drop everything.

But the deferral, if it even should be called that, was not reasonable. The money never came. Three months is far too long to go without paying employees – three weeks alone is excessive.

When paying tuition or rent, those employees couldn’t tell the university the equivalent of “the check’s in the mail” – they didn’t have that luxury.

And now, since Turner’s actions have infuriated the corporate office, employees’ back-pay is even more uncertain. It likely will become a legal battle, one for which Turner should pay every dime.

Even if Turner did happen to fall into horribly extenuating circumstances, he failed to communicate this with his employees, who looked to Turner for financial security.

Rather, he continued to instill within workers’ false hopes of an elusive payday.

This is enough to have made his tactics manipulative.

Turner owes his workers more than an apology. He owes them more than a paycheck.

He owes them an explanation.

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