Woman spends hour in boutique dressing room. Cops say she wasn’t just trying stuff on
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, a sheriff’s deputy in Monroe County was sent check on a “possible theft” at the Southern Charm General Store in Bolingbroke. When he arrived, a clerk there said a woman shopping had come in and put on “a large amount of jewelry” and worn it around the store “for several hours,” the deputy’s report noted.
The clerk said the woman at one point stayed in a dressing room for about an hour. When the woman emerged, the report went on, “the jewelry was no longer visible.” Soon the woman was said to have purchased about $600 worth of “other items.” The clerk said the woman left in a 2017 Mercedes SUV.
Another deputy spotted the silver Benz parked just past the Interstate 475 interchange nearby and spoke to the woman at the wheel, who was promptly identified as the suspected shoplifter. The woman, 38, denied having just left the store. She said she’d just turned around in the parking lot, that there was “another silver SUV that was in the parking lot” at the time.
The first deputy pulled up and informed the woman that the clerk had jotted down her license plate number and shown him photos of her inside the store. When shown the pictures, the woman said she had lied to the deputy “because she was ‘scared,’” the report said. The deputy told the woman that the store’s owner and the clerk “believed she stole a large amount of jewelry.”
The woman insisted she had not. It turned out that the SUV was uninsured, its registration suspended. Soon, the store’s owner and the clerk rode up and told the deputy that the headband and earrings the woman had on were stolen, and that “several price tags” for jewelry had been tossed on the dressing room floor.
The deputy searched the woman’s SUV and found jewelry valued at more than $1,200. Some was scattered in the SUV and some was on the ground nearby where the woman allegedly dropped it while walking her dog when the SUV was being inventoried. The woman reportedly said she “didn’t realize she had thrown it down.” The write-up concluded, noting that the woman, realizing she was about to be arrested on felony-shoplifting and other charges, blurted out, “Can I just pay for the items now?”
Dispatches: A Forsyth-area family called the sheriff’s department earlier this month about a young man who had flung his dishes “out of his house and in the front yard,” an incident report said. The young man was also said to have “spit on” someone. . . . Monroe deputies answered “verbal dispute” call on Horseshoe Lane in the wee hours of March 9. When they arrived, a woman was in the driveway yelling that her 31-year-old boyfriend was “tearing the house up,” according to an incident report. The boyfriend reportedly smashed some bottles and broke some pans. His father told the cops “it was just a family dispute,” that the son “had to go to work and everything would be okay.” About that time, the son bolted out a back door and into some woods, where deputies found him lying on his stomach behind a tree. The 31-year-old, said to have “reeked” of alcohol, was charged with disorderly conduct.