$30,000 missing
Adrian Patino-Rodriguez, a six-year employee of Big John’s Market in Healdsburg, was arrested on March 1 for three felony counts relating to alleged thefts from the store.
According to Healdsburg Police Officer Teygan Mason, he and officer Will Van Vleck were dispatched to the grocery store last week in response to a call from the owners, Kim and John Lloyd, who believed that Patino-Rodriguez had been stealing from the cash registers where he worked as a checker.
“The Lloyds said they had video that one of their employees was taking money,” Mason said. “We reviewed the video and paperwork from the Big John’s computer system.”
Patino-Rodriguez was asked to meet with the officers, and Mason said he was, “very cooperative.” Patino-Rodriguez was led quietly out of the store offices and handcuffed in the parking lot. He has been charged with burglary, embezzlement and grand theft.
The Lloyds said they knew they were short. “It didn’t make sense that we had that much shrink,” said John Lloyd, who said that the investigation began when the store bookkeeper got a call from a customer who thought he saw something suspicious.
“The bookkeeper looked at the (store surveillance) video and saw it,” Lloyd said.
“We got a new register system in early 2016 and he found the hole,” added Kim Lloyd. The Lloyds have a thick pile of printed reports showing that Patino-Rodriguez had many more voided sales at his register than other checkers with similar experience, “7 to 8 times as many,” said John Lloyd.
According to the Lloyds, matching the days and times of the voided sales to store surveillance videos indicated that Patino-Rodriguez was voiding cash sales and pocketing cash on a regular basis.
The new register system has records that go back 14 months, since early 2016 and the Lloyds say they have documentation that at least $30,000 went missing from Patino-Rodriguez’s registers in that time.
Patino-Rodriguez, 24, was booked into Sonoma County Jail and was released on $10,000 bail two days later on March 3.
