A few days ago, as I was leaving Target with my three kids, I saw a girl hustling out of the store pushing a grocery cart with a large Vizio flat screen tv in it. She was in a huge hurry and what caught my eye was that her pants were hanging down as she ran and I could see at least two inches of crack. It wasn't pretty.
As I got outside it dawned on me that she was ripping off the tv. A white truck was parked at the curb with two gnarly looking guys sitting in the cab. One nasty looking 40-something guy was waiting to help her heave it into the back of the truck. I immediately dug through my purse to find a pen and scrap paper to get the license plate. I was able to get it and I even wrote down a description of the truck with the make and model. As they tore out of there, I thought, "I can't believe what people think they are going to get away with."
I went back into the store and told the girl working in electronics what I just saw. She said, "I didn't sell a tv." And I replied, "Well, one just left your store." I gave her my information and the license plate number and left with my kids.
This is where things get embarrassing for me. I was contacted by a Sandy City police officer. I knew he was going to ask for a description of the girl. I told him she was Mexican, with long hair, early 20s, heavy, skanky looking, showing a lot of crack. That was my complete and extremely helpful description.
He next asked for a description of the guys outside. Once again, I tried not to use words like gnarly and "scary Larry" but I admitted to him I was so busy looking at the truck and getting the license plate I just noticed they were all hessian looking (A term of art in our family for trashy) but that I couldn't pick any of them out of a line-up.
A few days later, he did, in fact, come to my home and asked me to pick the female perpetrator out of a photo line-up.
The line-up looked something like this only with women:
I couldn't pick her face with certainty so I decided it would be better for the case to not pick any of them. (However, if he had brought me a photo line-up of each of their behinds instead of their faces, I probably could have picked the correct one.)
The target employee was able to correctly identify the girl so I don't think my inability to pick her out of the line-up was fatal to the case. Turns out she had done this exact same thing a few days earlier at a different store and got arrested for it. This whole experience just reminded me of something I already knew about criminals--they're stupid and most of the time, ugly.
