NEW ORLEANS — George Miller was hardly concerned when he saw two teen-aged girls loitering inside his favorite convenience store last Tuesday.
“Look at these two silly little girls,” he thought. “I wonder what they're doing.”
But when other customers at the Shell Station on Gentilly Boulevard and Paris Road alerted him that the girls were driving away in his 2011 Toyota Sequoia, Miller said he was stunned.
“Another fellow came in the door and said, ‘Hey is that your black truck out there?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I think somebody's stealing it.’ I said, ‘What?!?’”
Miller said one of the girls apparently snatched his keys right out from under him when he set them down on a counter inside the store.
Adding to the brazen nature of the crime, the theft took place in broad daylight in a crowded parking lot. A police bulletin said the theft took place at 4:21 p.m. on Dec. 1.
And it was all caught on video. From a security camera video posted by the NOPD from inside the store, two girls can be seen passing near the counter, one wearing a yellow jacket with a hood. From an outside camera, the girl in the yellow hoodie is seen calmly getting into the driver's seat, backing out of the parking space directly in front of the store and taking off.
“What she did was go across the street to the next gas station and then picked up the rest of what I call her gang. It must have been five or six other little girls,” Miller said.
The manager at the store said his Gentilly store, as well as convenience stores elsewhere in the city, have been hit with a rash of bold burglaries and thefts, often right under the nose of the victims.
“Happens all the time,” said the manager, who requested anonymity. “Every day, all over the city. They look for people who leave their doors unlocked, people who leave their keys in the car.”
Miller’s car was recovered by police 24 hours later on Orleans Avenue near S. Salcedo Street, badly wrecked and declared a total loss. In a crime bulletin, the NOPD said the car had been involved in a hit-and-run accident.
“At first I was really angry,” Miller said. “But a few minutes later, I started thinking about the big picture. And the fact that these kids were so young, and they were girls. And I'm wondering where us, as a society, kind of messed up and missed a few things.”
Miller said he hopes police catch the youngsters who stole and wrecked his truck. Not only to prevent more victims, but hopefully, he said, to keep the young thieves from traveling too far down the wrong road.
“They're going to have to learn that there are consequences to them doing wrong things,” he said. “They just can't continue to think that nothing's going to happen.”
