Fleeing Teenage Shoplifter Caught with His Pants Down

    May 18, 2005
    EAS tag alerted store manager to pursue thief, who lost his pants while crossing a fence

    Source The (San Luis Obispo) Tribune via Associated Press

    Pants off to this would-be shoplifter.

    An Atascadero, Calif. teenager left his loot and his trousers behind Monday, police said, when he shinnied over a fence to escape the manager of a San Luis Obispo record store.

    The 17-year-old boy triggered an anti-theft alarm around 11:30 a.m. when he walked out of Cheap Thrills at 563 Higuera St. with a stolen CD box set, according to store manager Ted Ingle.

    Ingle was the only employee in the front of the store at the time, he said. He followed the boy outside behind the business and tried to catch him as the teen started climbing an 8-foot fence covered with vines.

    "I grabbed his foot and told him to 'Come down, just come down,' " Ingle said.

    The youth's shoe came off. So Ingle grabbed the boy's pant leg and pulled.

    "His pants literally ripped off," Ingle said. "I was very surprised."

    The boy made it over the fence and kept running. Ingle was left holding most of the pair of American Eagle Outfitters jeans -- one leg ripped and stayed with the boy -- as well as the contents of the boy's pockets, including a cell phone and a wallet containing identification.

    The teen -- clad just in boxers, a shirt, socks and the pant leg -- also dropped his loot: a Nirvana box set worth about $50.

    "I'd have liked to be on the other side to see this guy make it down the street with no pants," Ingle said with a laugh.

    Cheap Thrills employee Raymond Hanson used the youth's cell phone to call his mother, then the police.

    "When it came over the scanner about the kid being on one side of the fence and the pants on the other, it caught our attention," Capt. Dan Blanke of the San Luis Obispo Police Department said with a chuckle.

    Police picked up the teen a couple of blocks away at Sandy's Deli & Liquor, Blanke said.

    The boy was arrested on suspicion of shoplifting and will be charged with petty theft, he said, adding that the teen has no prior criminal record. Police are not identifying the boy because he is a juvenile.

    Ingle said the jeans, which now have rips along the waist, front zipper and left pant leg, are in police custody. He hopes to display the pants at Cheap Thrills as a warning to would-be shoplifters.

    "If he's going to take something from me, I'm going to take something from him," Ingle said, with a laugh.