He must have just confused “head” with “bread”
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'So, they go out and they need to feed their child and they don't have money... They are put in a position where they feel like they need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night,'
Disturbing surveillance footage out of the Bay Area in California shows a serial shoplifter setting a store clerk’s hair on fire with stolen lighter fluid after he tried to stop the alleged thief from stealing.
Suraj — the store clerk who declined to reveal his last name out of fear of being targeted again — is seen on video tussling with Kendall Burton before Burton doused Suraj’s head in lighter fluid on Sept. 22 at the Appian Food and Liquor in El Sobrante, according to a video obtained by CBS News.
In the video, another worker is seen rushing to Suraj’s rescue with a baseball bat seconds before flames consume the clerk’s head after Burton ignites the fluid during the confrontation.
“I tried to cover his hand, but I don’t know. I don’t remember. He just lit the fire on me, you know,” Suraj told the outlet.
“I just rushed to the restroom, and I just splashed water on my face.”
Suraj — who has been working at the store for the past five years — said he and other workers at the Bay Area store deal with shoplifters regularly, but nothing of this magnitude has ever happened.
Fortunately for this blessing to society, even the largest can of lighter fluid is under California’s $900 theft threshold, so should be released from custody and returned to the streets before his victim is out of the hospital.
Chicago Armed Robbers on an Extraordinary Rampage: 'Everyone Is so Freaked Out'
In the days before and after those robberies, waves of other stickups were happening around the city, including a driver accosted by rifle-toting teens as he was unloading his car in Bucktown, a woman carjacked at gunpoint in Rogers Park, students walking near DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus and a bar worker mugged after leaving work in the West Loop.
While armed robberies are nothing new in Chicago, a disturbing new pattern has emerged in recent months where crews of robbers — many of them juveniles — toting high-powered weapons go on crime sprees, robbing or carjacking multiple victims in a matter of minutes, often using stolen cars and dressed head to toe in black.
They seem to be constantly one step ahead of authorities. Before police can even respond to one scene, more have popped up, leaving dozens upon dozens of victims in their wake.
“I think everyone is so freaked out, who’s lived in this area for a long time, because of the random and brazen nature of what’s happening right now,” said Rod O’Connor, who has lived in the Humboldt Park area for more than two decades. “I want the next generation of shooters to not become shooters, but the generation right now is what we’re all freaked out about and why I worry about my kid riding her bike two blocks from her house.”
…. Jose Pizarro, director of safe streets for the Alliance of Local Social Organizations, believes that the youth of Chicago are being driven by a “feeling of desperation.”
“We have young people who are in survival mode, and the reason they’re in survival mode is because they feel they have nowhere else to go. They feel they have no future,” Pizarro said.
On the contrary, these young people see a future in crime with pretty girls in each arm and enough bling that a blind man can see it. It ain’t rocket science. And the fact that businesses are being driven out of these neighborhoods because people like Mr. Pizarro are excusing their behavior doesn’t seem to register.
