On Wednesday evening, at about 7 p.m., 35-year-old James Lowell Evans walked into the Tom Thumb at 315 Hampton Road, in Oak Cliff. He wandered around the store for a while before meandering over to the personal care aisle, where, according to the store's loss prevention manager, he slipped seven bottles of Pond's skin lotion (total value $47.43) into his apparently spacious pants pockets.
Evans didn't have a shopping cart, so it was possible that he merely needed the pockets to lug the half gallon of lotion to the cash register, a patented move of the lazy male shopper. But no: He walked right past the cashiers and out the door.
The manager confronted Evans just outside the store's front door and brought him to his office to wait for police to arrive. Given DPD's new commitment to not dealing with petty theft, you wonder whether the police would have ever come.
But that was chance Evans wasn't willing to take.
The alleged shoplifter grabbed a pen from the manager and, without warning or explanation, began stabbing himself. An ambulance was called, but medics determined Evans' stabs were actually pokes and that he didn't need medical attention.
So instead of being taken to the hospital, as was Evans' apparent plan, he was taken to Lew Sterrett on a theft charge. And Tom Thumb got its half gallon of lotion back.