Rincon Beat
August 21, 7:07 p.m.
A man put great effort (and risk) into getting a small discount on a shirt while at an already low-priced, nonprofit thrift store (whose goal, ironically, is to help to people in financial strife), according to a Pima Country Sheriff’s Department report.
Sheriff’s deputies responded to a local Goodwill store, where a customer had asserted that he’d smelled a man in the bathroom apparently “smoking something … (with) a strong chemical smell.”
Employees said the man had exited the bathroom and directed deputies to a dressing room, where they knocked. The man opened the door wearing a clean white shirt, and said he hadn’t been smoking in the bathroom but actually “burning some strings off his shorts” (for some poorly explained reason).
As it turned out after deputies identified the man, he already had a warrant out for his arrest. But first they had to ensure he was wearing his own clothes before arresting him.
When asked which of the numerous shirts in the dressing room belonged to the subject, he grabbed a sweat-stained black shirt … which deputies thought odd because it had a tag on it (and Goodwill washes its clothing). They then noticed a tag sitting on the bench that wasn’t attached to a shirt, and the piece of plastic that would’ve held the tag to the shirt “appeared to have been burnt … and was missing the end.”
Examining the tag on the sweaty shirt, one deputy deduced that it had been falsely attached: “The end appeared to have been burned and pressed onto the sleeve and melted to the shirt.”
Asked if he was sure that particular shirt was his, the man changed his mind and claimed that he’d actually been wearing a clean black shirt, which apparently didn’t have a tag. But when he was putting that one on, deputies saw that he’d apparently removed the tag even from the white shirt he’d first been wearing, since a suspicious fragment of its plastic attachment was protruding from the shirt’s bottom.
Finally the man admitted to having gone into the bathroom to switch the tag from the clean black shirt to his sweaty black shirt, as well as to trying to remove the tag from the white shirt—apparently having used a lighter to burn the plastic that attached the tags.
After he begrudgingly donned his own sweaty shirt, he was escorted to jail.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2015.
“… which deputies thought odd because it had a tag on it (and Goodwill washes its clothing).” The vast majority of clothing donations that come into Goodwill Retail Stores never get washed. Which is likely as relevant to the arrested reported in this article as the original assumption that Goodwill washed clothing donations was in the first place.
Fantine
Fantine by Margaret Hall
The story begins in 1815 in Digne, as the peasant Jean Valjean, just released from 19 years’ imprisonment in the galleys—five for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family and fourteen more for numerous escape attempts—is turned away by innkeepers because his yellow passport marks him as a former convict. He sleeps on the street, angry and bitter.
Digne’s benevolent Bishop Myriel gives him shelter. At night, Valjean runs off with Myriel’s silverware. When the police capture Valjean, Myriel pretends that he has given the silverware to Valjean and presses him to take two silver candlesticks as well, as if he had forgotten to take them. The police accept his explanation and leave. Myriel tells Valjean that his life has been spared for God, and that he should use money from the silver candlesticks to make an honest man of himself.