Homeless Woman Allegedly Steals Van Loaded With Food For the Homeless
A homeless woman allegedly drove off in a delivery van containing 100 meals for the homeless this morning, in an incident caught on surveillance video.
To make matters worse perhaps, the woman who reportedly absconded with the food truck had just received a free breakfast from the homeless outreach organization that owned the same vehicle.
This dine-and-dash incident occurred in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The Lord’s Place/Cafe Joshua, the nonprofit group dedicated to serving the homeless community in the area, is reportedly staffed by formerly homeless people.
Robert Coleman, Cafe Joshua’s food services director/chef, who had just finished two hours of work preparing breakfast for those in need, told NBC News West Palm Beach affiliate WPTV that the apparently hungry and polite woman who was sitting outside on a bench approached and asked him if she could get something to eat.
“Surveillance cameras were rolling when Coleman brought the woman breakfast. Then he started loading up the organization’s delivery truck to bring breakfast to an event…Coleman left the car running and went inside for about 90 seconds to grab another load of items to put in the van. Cameras catch the woman shutting the back doors to the van and jumping in the driver’s seat before taking off.”
Cops later found the van abandoned but undamaged elsewhere in the city later that day, but the female suspect, who is estimated to be in the age 40 to 50 range, and all the food that had been inside were long gone.
Coleman remarked that he is harboring no hard feelings toward the woman and would help her again if she returned to what some might refer to as the scene of the crime.
“It’s unusual for something like that to happen just because of our reputation. People know that we try to take care of people here,” he explained to CBS 12 of West Palm Beach.
Caught on camera: woman steals The Lord's Place/Cafe Joshua food deliver truck after getting free meal. @WPTV pic.twitter.com/lD0p6qmtgR
— Charlie Keegan (@CharlieKeegan41) September 25, 2015
Elsewhere in Florida, in a roughly similar incident to what went down in West Palm, someone jacked a 15-seat passenger van belonging to a small Orlando-area charity that assists needy families.
Family Promise of Greater Orlando also feeds the homeless along with providing transportation services to those families such as shuttling parents to job training and employment interviews and taking their kids to school.
“The vehicle…disappeared from its spot in a Florida Hospital parking lot…sometime between Thursday evening and sunrise Friday morning,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.
[Image via Twitter]
