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Everyone knows that on the surface stealing is wrong. I mean, everyone pretty much knows this.
If you take something without paying for it or working for it in exchange you know full well that what you are doing isn’t right.
I also know that people that not every person who steals something is someone who is doing it for the sake of doing it. Sometimes you get someone who is beyond desperate and has absolutely no other choice.
I’ve never been “steal from a grocery store” level of desperation, but there were times when things got so bad in my early twenties that I thought about it. Thankfully, I had folks around me who saw how things were and helped me out.
Sometimes folks who are stealing food from grocery stores are just folks who need help who the help hasn’t arrived yet.
Recently, two police officers were called to a North Carolina Food Lion location to investigate a shoplifting.
The person who stole from the store wasn’t apprehended at the location, but video from the parking lot caught the person’s license plate number and cops were able to track the vehicle to the address associated with the car.
There they found the home of Theresa West, a mother of three who to say had fallen on hard times would be an understatement. Her kids hadn’t eaten in nearly three days and the situation was getting dire.
She explained to the cops that she stole approximately thirty-six dollars worth of food, enough to feed her kids for a handful of days.
She profusely apologized to the police and to the store itself for doing what she had to do. Everyone understood but they had to arrest her. It must have killed the officers to do it but they had to arrest her.
It seems that she was in and out of the jail quicker than a hiccup. After they had originally left Theresa, she came home to see several bags of groceries sitting on her front steps.
There was somewhere around $150 worth of groceries, enough to get her by until she was able to afford groceries again. Theresa had suffered a work-related injury and was unable to afford food.
The cops could have gone by the letter of the law and just emotionlessly arrested her. Instead, they did something that should make everyone proud of them
