Women Steal Stroller From NJ Store and Leave Child Behind, Police Say

A woman walking a baby in a stroller. STR/AFP/Getty Images

Three women were captured on a camera allegedly involved in stealing a baby stroller from a store in New Jersey, while one woman leaves her child behind in the store.

The three women were at Bambi Baby in Middletown on Aug. 3 with three children, said police.

According to The Associated Press, two of the women distracted an employee. The third woman allegedly stole the stroller.

As they left the store, one left her own child. One of the women then returned after she realized the child was left there, AP reported.

“What I take major offense to is the children. Don’t do that with your children,” store owner Enelio Ortega, told WCBS. “If you need to steal for a living, that’s a personal problem, that’s a personal issue. But when you bring children that have no idea what’s going on, that affected me. That’s why I’m sharing [the video] as much as possible.”

Two of the three women were arrested and now face shoplifting and conspiracy charges. They are both from the United Kingdom and are in their 20s.

The third woman is still at large.

The store manager, Justin, told the CBS affiliate that shoplifting is rare at the store. “We haven’t had any issues here at this store. I was like, devastated that someone would leave their child in a store to worry more about stealing a stroller,” he said.

Ortega said the shoplifters stole an English stroller that likely would have been cheaper to buy overseas.

“It’s only a $300 stroller. She could’ve taken a $1000 stroller that was right next to it. So I don’t know what the real intentions were,” said Ortega.

He speculated that she stole the stroller because it was collapsable so she could take it with her on a plane.

The two suspects were identified as Maryann Cash, 23, and Nan McCarthy, 20.

Crime Facts in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend.

Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.