Thrift-Shop Robbers Strike Again

March 11, 2009 at 8:24 am | Posted in News | Leave a comment

The trend continues. How low can you go? A St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Newark, Ohio has been burglarized, as reported by Channel 4 in Columbus. It happened on January 25, but as the crime remains unsolved, Licking County Crime Stoppers is now offering up to a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of those responsible. At night while the store was closed, the perpetrator(s) broke a window, climbed in and stole an undisclosed amount of money. According to Channel 4, some of that money was snatched from a “jug” in the store itself, and some of it was stolen from “a coffee can that was stored in a locker” outside the public shopping area.

Don’t pull that “desperate times call for desperate measures” line on us. It won’t wash. Then again, we’re not saints. If St. Vincent de Paul heard about this crime, he’d probably cry — and buy the burglars lunch. As described in our book The Scavengers’ Manifesto: “St. Vincent de Paul was a 17th-century French priest whose pioneering charity efforts included orphanages, foundlings’ homes, workhouses and soup kitchens. Some of these institutions sound chilling to modern ears, but they were revolutionary in Vincent’s lifetime — a brutal era when poor urban orphans were commonly forced into prostitution and/or deliberately maimed and used as begging-bait. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul — founded in 1833 by a young Parisian student named Frédéric Ozanam, who was inspired by Vincent and who has been canonized as well — now operates hundreds of stores.”