Couple Arrested And Child Taken....

[Victor]

For forgetting to pay for sandwiches.

Couple arrested and child taken for forgetting to pay for sandwi - Hawaii News Now - KGMB and KHNL Home

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Nicole Leszczynski is nearly eight months pregnant and in distress.

"I'm infuriated. I cannot believe that this has been taken so far," she said.

As Hawaii News Now first reported, Wednesday night, October 26, Nicole and her husband, Marcin, and their three-year-old daughter, Zophia, were shopping in the Safeway store on Beretania Street.

"We got into the store. I was feeling a little lightheaded and we decided to eat some sandwiches. We put the wrappers in the cart. There wasn't any effort made to conceal anything," she said.

The couple checked out, paid $50 for their groceries, but not the $5 for the two chicken salad sandwiches.

"We walked out of the store and were confronted by two men asking where the receipt was for the sandwiches," she said. "We completely forgot that we hadn't paid for the sandwiches. As soon as they confronted us, I immediately offered to pay. We had cash. The manager said that it was against store policy to pay for merchandise after it had been removed from the store."

Nicole said police were called. She and her husband were arrested and booked at the main station on suspicion of theft in the fourth degree.

"They tried to work with us, and tried to work it out so one of us would be taken at a time. Unfortunately, we both had to go in. CPS was called and they took my daughter," she said.

Child Welfare Services kept Zophia overnight. Nicole has never spent a day away from her daughter.

"I wonder if she's brushed her teeth. Is she asking about us? It's very upsetting," she said.

Shortly after our interview, Zophia was returned to her parents.

Child Welfare Services said when both parents are arrested, as in this case, the department steps in to care for the child. By law, it has three working days to assess a child's home and gather information on the parents. CPS said it works as fast as it can.

As for Safeway, a spokesman told Hawaii News Now the company will not comment because it's investigating the case.

Nicole blames the store manager for being inflexible and for insisting they be arrested.

"I cannot believe that this has been taken so far, that they would do so much damage to a family when there was not malicious intent. And there was no effort to conceal or steal from them," she said.

The Leszczynski's have a court date. They said they'll fight the shoplifting charge. They are consulting a lawyer.

[grzftbl]

gov't employee w/ too much power. happens way too often.

[ILikeToParty]

Unbelievable. Just amazes me how friggen dumb our society is getting. Id seriously be lookin for payback for whatever store employee made this such a huge deal if my kid got taken from me even for a second. Some people just need the crap kicked out of them for real, male or female

This is disgusting

[JR7302001]

Who chased them down? Dog, the bounty hunter?

[cook county capper]

"We walked out of the store and were confronted by two men asking where the receipt was for the sandwiches," she said. "We completely forgot that we hadn't paid for the sandwiches. As soon as they confronted us, I immediately offered to pay. We had cash. The manager said that it was against store policy to pay for merchandise after it had been removed from the store."


THEY should have eat before they went shopping.
It wasn't the store's fault THEY didn't pay for what they ate.
THEY walked past the point of no return.

The only thing the store did wrong was arrest both parents, that's all.
Take one to the station, release the other on an I-Bond with the kid.
They are both at fault, and maybe if they cared about their child, they wouldn't have broken the law.

Go work in loss prevention and you will know where I am going here.
Everyone has an excuse.

I forgot......? Ok. Everyone says that.

And to make a big deal out of it shows they want money.


It's not disgusting ILTP, it's a bad choice by probably decent parents.

[Cash Calloway]

The woman is eight months pregnant, and already has a kid, give her a bit of a break. Seriously 2 sandwiches for $5. Safeway is still alive and well in the USA. Another chain that has gone under in Canada.

[cuse_man]

lol talk about a PR nightmare

[Keith]

the "merchandise" was not "removed from the store". It was consumed inside the store. While I can appreciate loss prevention concerns, if they kept the sandwich wrappers in the cart (which they said they did in order to pay for them), then common sense would tell you they were being truthful about that. If it was their intention not to pay for the food (and to just eat it while walking in the store), then they would not have put the wrappers into their cart.

[smooth53_98]

Mom isn't bad looking for 8 months pregnant... store security could have worked out some sort of 'alternative' form of payment...

[Cash Calloway]

I must confess I still try to rip off the occasional BBQ chicken from the local Wal-Mart. Not a big deal as far as I'm concerned.

[NightCap424]

how about my alma mater......associate dean getting booted for shoplifting from Wal-Mart. Sad thing is, he probably made close to six figures in salary.

http://http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/new...lifting-arrest

[buli]

Safeway Apologizes, Drops Shoplifting Charges Against Couple, But Sting Still Lingers, And Media Attention is on the Rise

Hawaii News Now (which published this photo) was the first media to break the story about the couple being arrested. Nicole Leszczynski credits Jim Mendoza's report with helping her get her daughter back from Child Protective Services.

BY MALIA ZIMMERMAN - The news about the arrest of Nicole Leszczynski, 28, and her husband Marcin, 33, in the Safeway store on Beretania Street in Honolulu continues to make national and international news ranging from the Washington Post to the London Daily Mail - and it has even caught the attention of Steven Colbert.

The couple, who moved back to Hawaii from California just days ago with their 2 year old daughter Zofia, was arrested last week after forgetting to pay for a pair of sandwiches from the deli, on sale 2 for $5, which they ate before paying for $50 worth of groceries and leaving the store.

Nicole, who is 30 weeks pregnant, snacked on the sandwich because she was feeling faint, and she told Hawaii Reporter that in the small town where she is from, it is not unusual for people to eat something in the store and pay for it on the way out. She even saved the wrapper and a chicken bone that she found in the chicken salad sandwich to show the manager.

Nicole believes that the store employees and security guards were watching them because she said none of the checkout clerks, including their own and the one next to them, responded when she tried to strike up a conversation. The clerk next to them dropped a role of quarters that Marcin helped retrieve, and even then, the clerks did not look at them or say thank you. She thought at the time that it was the "weirdest" Safeway she'd ever been too.

Once Nicole, Marcin and Zofia were three feet out the door, they stopped to organize the groceries so they could get on the bus and go home. It was around 7 p.m. But the security guard stopped them and asked if they had a receipt for the sandwiches. Once they realized they had paid for everything but the sandwiches, they asked to go back into the store and pay the $2.5o for each. But instead, they were escorted upstairs with their toddler to the employee break room where they waited for another 4 hours for police to arrive. During that time, employees milled in and out of the break room and sat at a table with the family, eating their dinner without ever looking up, even though Nicole was "balling her eyes out."

She said she kept calm for her daughter's sake - and tried to keep her daughter entertained - until the police told the couple that the store was pressing charges, that they were going to be arrested and that their daughter would be picked up by Child Protective Services until the situation was resolved. When Zofia was escorted down the stairs and out of the store by a child welfare representative, Nicole says she "lost it."

During that time, and as the situation kept escalating, two police, two security guards and the manager just stood there and looked at her saying nothing, Nicole said. She wondered how far it would go. They found out soon enough.

Nicole and Marcin were arrested, spent about an hour in jail, and were released around midnight on $50 bail. They had signed a 2-page form that Safeway gave them promising not to return to any Safeway for a year, so they could not pick up their groceries without a police escort.

Once they made it home on the bus, they spent the night awake in shock. Nicole said that they called Child Protective Service's (CPS) abuse hotline continuously starting at 6 a.m. until about noon to get their daughter back.

Frustrated with the lack of response, they called a family attorney and learned troubling news: the state could keep their daughter for up to three business days and even over the weekend, and they would not know where she was, how to contact her or what she was being told. In addition, CPS workers were backlogged and hadn't returned their calls.

Horrified that they might not see their daughter for several days, they headed down to Child Protective Service's office in Kalihi where they planned to camp out until they got their daughter returned. On the way, they passed Hawaii News Now, a local television news station, and told reporter Jim Mendoza their story. He went with them to CPS to get some answers.

The little girl, who has never been separated from her parents over night before, had already spent 18 hours away from her parents, her home, her books, and her favorite stuffed animals (a stuffed duck and a Clifford dog). Her parents were very worried about how the toddler would react.

Nicole said it was only because of the news camera in the office that they were able to speak to a case worker. She helped them get their daughter back soon after. The little girl held tightly on to her mother's neck after her parents picked her up at the designated McDonalds restaurant. She is normally a "great sleeper", her mother said, sleeping through the night since she was 6 weeks old, but the little girl has woken up every night since asking her mother to hug her and not let go.

A Safeway spokesperson called Nicole yesterday to apologize and said the supermarket chain would not press charges for the loss of the $5 sandwiches, but Nicole said the man who called quickly blamed the police and state for what happened to them after they left the store. He said the employees at Safeway were just following procedure.

Nicole is a former U.S. Air Force linguist and her husband works in the medical field. They lived in Hawaii from 2005 to 2009 in Miliani and Kalihi and never had a problem like this, she said. They loved Hawaii and the people here so much, that they decided after living in California for the last two years, they would like to return and raise their children here in the islands.

The whole experience was unreal, embarrassing and kept getting "more and more sinister," she said.

A retired policeman told Hawaii Reporter that some others stores here handle shoplifting differently and that they have someone inside the store who can ask about items before shoppers leave the premise, and therefore keep problems like this to a minimum.

There is a backlash against the family now, with comments under the local Star-Advertiser attacking Nicole and Marcin for everything from Nicole trying to use her pregnancy as an excuse to accusing them of being criminals - reactions that surprised the normally private couple.

Others have said they should sue the store, which she said they have not mentioned and have no plans to do.

She's also taken aback by the national and international interest in her story.

While the couple just wants to put the incident behind them, Nicole said they did learn some lessons and hopefully they will be better people because of the experience. She also looks at it as an opportunity to bring much needed attention to societal problems in terms of how these kinds of situations are handled.

Nicole said that at every step along the way - from the clerks who could have asked about the wrapper in the cart, to the security guard and manager who could have let them pay the $5 after they realized their mistake, to the police who could have arrested them separately so their daughter could stay with one parent over night, to the state keeping the child for 18 hours without responding to the parents - someone could have stepped in to say that this has gone far enough - stop it. But no one spoke up. That, Nicole said, was the most surprising thing of all.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by buli

Safeway Apologizes, Drops Shoplifting Charges Against Couple, But Sting Still Lingers, And Media Attention is on the Rise


She even saved the wrapper and a chicken bone that she found in the chicken salad sandwich to show the manager.

Someone who had no intention of paying for the sandwich would obviously not do that.

Of course, someone who is willing to eat a chicken salad sandwich off the shelf of a supermarket might have other culinary "issues". LOL

[ILikeToParty]

[QUOTE=cook county capper;4691171



It's not disgusting ILTP, it's a bad choice by probably decent parents.[/QUOTE]



Lemme take a wild guess here . . . . .

You have no children of your own right?