(ZeroHedge) After 13 years of service to Lowe’s, an elderly white woman has been fired after she received a beating and black eye from black shoplifters brazenly rolling $2,100 worth of goods out of a store in Georgia. That’s the steep price she paid for heroically trying to thwart the trio’s theft — in violation of Lowe’s policy.
“They say that if you see somebody stealing something out the door, not to pursue, not to go out. I lost it,” Donna Hansbrough told the Effingham Herald. “I grabbed the cart. I don’t actually remember going out but I did. And I grabbed the cart that had the stolen items in (it).”
Police say that cart was being pushed on June 25th by Takyah Berry, who punched Hansbrough in the face three times, leaving her with a black eye that lingers almost a month later. Berry was allegedly accompanied by her uncle, Joseph Berry, and a man named Jarmar Lawton. After attacking Hansbrough, Berry and her accomplices left with the stolen goods. Lawton is in police custody on unrelated charges, but the two Berrys are at large.
Like many good citizens, it seems Hansbrough simply lost her patience with corporate America’s widespread toleration of shameless, daylight robberies. “I just got tired of seeing things get out the door. I just, I lost it. I basically lost all the training. Everything they tell you to do, I just…I just lost it,” she said.
With more than a dozen years working at the Lowe’s location in Rincon, Georgia — about a half hour north of Savannah — Hansbrough expected consequences but wasn’t braced for Lowe’s’ cruel reaction to her selfless reflex that drove her to try to stop wrongdoing.
“I didn’t expect to get terminated,” the now-former live-plants customer associate said. “Maybe a reprimand or a suspension.” Choking back tears as she contemplated her sudden unemployment, Hansbrough told WJCL, “A lot of people know me as the plant lady…and it hurts, because I like them all.”
Lowe’s policy prohibiting employee intervention against criminals is typical of major retailers, who seek to reduce the associated risks that intervention present to employees and to the company.
The result, however, is a rising wave of theft that costs untold billions — Target alone said thievery slashed its latest fiscal-year gross margins by $600 million. Those costs will inevitably be passed along to honest consumers in the form of higher prices — a new form of wealth redistribution in a society that already has too much of it.
