Hector Velazquez Maldonado picked the wrong day to steal from Walmart. Sunday was the annual Shop with a Cop charity event in Chesterfield County, Virginia. He apparently didn’t notice the herd of police cruisers in the parking lot. If he did, he wasn’t deterred by the presence of “more than 50 uniformed officers.”
Walmart security clues cops
The local Walmart in Chesterfield was busier than usual on Sunday, December 1. It was the special “Shop with a Cop” day where local officers pair up with neighborhood families in need, “to help them buy holiday gifts for their children.”
With the store packed solid with shoppers, Maldonado figured he could pocket a few items unnoticed. He was noticed anyway.
“This year we added a little flair to it,” Lieutenant James Lamb relates. The bonus excitement “came when a Walmart employee approached officers at the store to tell them there was a shoplifting in progress.”
Multiple officers quickly dispersed through the aisles “looking for the suspected thief.” They soon located and surrounded the sticky fingered felon.
“As we approached from different directions, he tried to escape out the back of the store.” Cops carry radios.
There were more officers waiting for him behind the Walmart. Once they got the suspect in cuffs, they matched 32-year-old Maldonado up with his outstanding record.
Failure to appear
For one thing, he had a warrant out for “failure to appear in another shoplifting case.” They aren’t going to let him out on bail again in the near future.
“He does have other open cases in Chesterfield as well for larceny,” Lamb explains. Walmart pressed charges so Maldonado was charged with felony grand larceny for his “Shoplift with a Cop” incident.
The things Maldonado tried to get away with were small but expensive, showing he has a practiced eye for retail theft. “Police say the collection of items he was attempting to steal is valued at nearly $1,400.”
Virginia is one of those liberal jurisdictions where they refuse to prosecute anyone carrying out stolen goods valued below an arbitrary dollar figure.
Walmart and other retailers are forced to pass the price of stolen merchandise off to customers who bother to pay. Those are getting harder to find. Now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, where he belongs, things should begin to look a little brighter for retailers.
The House and Senate both hold a Republican majority and they’ve been promising Walmart, Target, Walgreens and all the other struggling retailers that enforcement of laws will once again become a high priority.
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