On Friday, Feb. 24, at 12:14 p.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department went to Sears, located at 302 Colorado Avenue in response to a theft report (another one?).
A woman had entered the store and taken a large number of clothes and then left the store rather hurriedly and had been reported as last being seen walking into the Holiday Inn, located at 200 Colorado Avenue carrying the stolen merchandise.
When the officers arrived, they met with the loss prevention officers from Sears outside the Holiday Inn.
The loss prevention officers caught site of the woman while they were talking with the officers and pointed her out to them. The woman was, by that time, actually wearing all of the items that she had taken from the store so the officers detained her.
The woman repeatedly lied to the police about her identity, giving the officers a number of different names that she claimed were all her own. The woman was eventually placed under a private person’s arrest and taken off to jail whereupon she was charged with petty theft and providing false information to the police.
The bail for this 24-year-old homeless woman was set at $5,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
