WESTFIELD – Although an apparent thief managed to lock the keys to his ‘get-away car’ inside the vehicle, he still got away with a stolen portable electrical generator after he declined assistance from the store’s loss prevention officer.
City police report that a caller from the Home Depot store on East Main Street reported at 7 p.m. Saturday that a man had stolen a portable generator valued at about $1,000 from the store’s sales floor about a half hour earlier.
Officers Scott Phelon and Matthew Schultze were dispatched to the store and report they spoke with the loss prevention employee who showed them the store’s security video.
The video shows a male party enter the store and push a merchandise cart to the electrical generator section of the store where he selects one and puts it on his cart.
It then shows the man push the cart to the front of the store where he pauses before pushing the cart out of the store, without making any attempt to pay for the merchandise.
In the parking lot, the suspect can be seen putting the generator into the bed of his pickup truck.
Ironically, the loss prevention employee drove into the parking lot then and saw the man loading his truck but, since he had no way of knowing then that the man was stealing the generator, thought nothing of it.
The man then returned to the store and the generator department but left when an employee approached him.
The suspect returned to the parking lot where he found that he had locked his keys inside his truck.
He was not stymied, the loss prevention officer said, but opened the sliding back window of his truck and was starting to wriggle inside. The store employee said that, not yet knowing that a theft had occurred, he approached and offered the man assistance.
The employee told the officers that the thief declined his assistance. He said the suspect pointed to the generator and gratuitously said “I paid for that” before he made his way into the cab of his truck and drove away.
The Ford F-150 pickup the suspect drove is apparently registered to a Colrain resident but the officers were not immediately able to reach the owner to confirm that his truck was involved in the crime.
