Transcript: Channel 5 SWAT Sit In video

Channel 5 News Report

Cherokee Ballard: Restaurants still have a right to offer smoking sections.

Jeff Cunningham: But a group of kids called SWAT, or Students Working Against Tobacco, claimed the right to breathe clean air. Today they tried to do a sit in at an Edmond restaurant until the police showed up. Only on 5, Kimberly Lohman shows us this heated battle of this smoking.

Kimberly Lohman: It started out quietly enough, at least as quiet as 25 anti-smoking teenagers on a mission can be.

Koorosh Zahrai: What we’re trying to show is that by making restaurants go smoke free you are not hurting the economy because going smoke free actually increases your sales.

Kimberly Lohman: Kids ate lunch, taking as many smoking tables as they could, all but three, to try to keep this Denney’s smoke free for an hour.

Koorosh Zahrai: We are here to try and educate people, the public and waitresses and workers that second-hand smoke causes cancer and kills 750 Oklahomans each year.

Kimberly Lohman – Koorosh Zahrai knows because he actually tested how much smoke filters over to non-smoking sections.

Koorosh Zahrai – I sat in the smoking and the non-smoking section and tested both sections at the exact same time with this little meter, it’s about this big.

Kimberly Lohman: Well since we were just asked to leave by the manager of Denney’s and the kids are about to be asked to leave, we thought we would take a look at Koorosh Zahrai’s study. He looked at 44 public areas and found that only Bellini’s passed the clean air test. Inside Denney’s the protest got a little more vocal.

Crowd: This hour has been provided by SWAT, Students Working Against Tobacco.

Kimberly Lohman: That’s when the manager had had enough.

Crowd: Second-hand smoke kills, second-hand smoke kills, second-hand smoke kills.

Kimberly Lohman: The kids moved outside until the cops came. No tickets, no arrests, the no smoking mission accomplished.

Koorosh Zahrait: Our goal is not to be kicked out, our goal is just to have our message heard.

Kimberly Loham, Eye Witness News 5 reporting.

Jeff Cunningham: Koorosh Zahrai was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Tobacco Free Oklahoma Coalition to do his study. On September 26th, the SWAT kids plan to march in downtown Oklahoma to bring attention to the issue of kids’ access to cigarettes. 6,000 Oklahoma kids are SWAT members.