Brazen Crooks Give New Meaning to 'Repeat Offenders'

A Wauwatosa police officer got a surprise Friday when he was called to the store at 10800 W. Capitol Drive at 2:25 p.m. on a complaint that a man and a woman had left with merchandise — toys, diapers and candy — they had not paid for.

The officer interviewed witnesses and then asked to see the store's surveillance video footage. He wrote in his report that when shown the video, he recognized the suspects as “positively the same two subjects that I had arrested a short while earlier.”

A very short while. The same two people, driving the same car, had just two hours earlier been arrested for theft at the store at 3201 N. Mayfair Rd.

At 12:15 p.m., an 18-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested for theft and battery and a 30-year-old Milwaukee woman was arrested on a fugitive warrant when they were stopped leaving the Kmart store with a shopping cart loaded with stolen merchandise worth $374.19.

The man got into a fight with the store loss prevention employee, punching him repeatedly. The pair then got in a car and drove off, but the Tosa officer pulled them over before they got far.

The man was booked and his bail set at $600 plus costs (total $807) on the theft charge and $500 plus costs (total $681) for battery. The woman was wanted on a bench warrant from the St. Francis Police Department. They were both processed and released.

The police report notes that the 18-year-old suspect had been read his Miranda rights at 1:20 p.m., before being interviewed. Given the time it would have taken to take his statement and then be processed out, it is almost certain that the two must have gone directly from the Wauwatosa police station to the Walgreens store to pull their second job.

Police are seeking the two suspects, and they have a very good idea whom they are looking for.