Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Florida TikToker Nabbed For Stealing From Target — Again

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Marlena Velez was charged with a second count of petit theft after Cape Coral Police said she scanned bar codes for cheaper items than she took from a Target store last month. Velez has more than 300,000 followers on TikTok and had posted video of an October Target run that helped police identify her. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy looks at the second arrest and the new video in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Download the FREE Upside App at https://upside.app.link/crimefix to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guests: Lisa Greenberg / https://www.instagram.com/capepd/Kathleen Bogenschutz / https://x.com/katieesquireCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this law and crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Get ready with me to talk about the elephant in the room. That elephant just got a lot bigger for Marlena Velez, the TikTok influencer accused of stealing from Target and posting video of it online. Now Velez has been arrested again. So I'm going to need you to put your hands behind your back. Wait, what?

Put your hands behind your back. Wait, gee. Don't fight it. Don't fight it. I look at the new details about this latest arrest and the big ask Velez is making. Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Marlena Velez's troubles are going from bad to worse, and you are not going to believe what she wants from the court. Stay tuned for that. I told you about the self-proclaimed TikTok influencer who was arrested and charged with theft from a Target store just recently.

Police in Cape Coral, Florida said back on October 30th, Velez scanned barcodes for cheaper items, not for the items she actually took from the store. Then Velez posted video of the shopping trip on TikTok for her more than 300,000 followers to see, even loading the bags from Target into the back of the car. Well, that might not have been the smartest move because police say it gave them more evidence and a way to identify her. Police had put out this surveillance image of Velez to identify her, and they said they matched her outfit in the photo to what she was wearing in the TikTok video of the shopping trip to verify her identity based on a tip. Velez was booked into the Lee County Jail on November 20th on a petty theft charge. Police said she'd stolen $500 worth of goods by undercharging herself at

the self-checkout. Well, guess what? Marlena Velez, she was arrested again over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend on Saturday, November 30th. So I'm gonna need you to put your hands behind your back. Wait, what? Put your hands behind your back. Wait, gee! Don't fight it, don't fight it.

I have to put shoes on. Hold on, I will talk to you in a second, all right? Just give us a second, just give us a second. No, this is why I told you. Call Sydney. Call my dad. Call my grandma. Tell them to call my lawyer now. Nothing. Nothing illegal. Take a seat. We'll have a female officer here in a second. That's ridiculous. Gene! Sure.

Stay with her. Yeah. Stay with her. Yeah, stay with her. Cape Coral Police released surveillance footage from Target. It was from November, and it shows Velez walking into the store and then going to the self-checkout with two children and a man. The children and the man appear in her TikTok videos with her as well. The video shows Velez scanning what appears to be children's clothing at the self-checkout, but you can actually see Velez has something in her hand that she's holding underneath the clothes to scan. It's very obvious, and we can slow it down so you can see.

She does it over and over again. Truthfully, she's not even that slick about it. Lisa Greenberg is a public affairs officer with the Cape Coral Police Department. Lisa, this is deja vu all over again. We're back here, same place, talking about this all over again. So talk to me a little bit about this latest arrest of Marlena Velez. So essentially, our officers were called to the target on November 30th and were made aware by loss prevention officers that there was another theft involving the same suspect that happened on November 20th. So just before she was arrested that first initial time, they said that she was doing the same thing where she was scanning false barcodes and ended up walking away with $225 worth of items that she didn't pay for. So it is, again,

a deja vu kind of thing where we're seeing this similar crime. However, I know there was some confusion with the timeline. So this happened the day before we actually brought her into custody. Do you get the feeling that Target Loss Prevention might be going back through their videos and maybe looking at her target records or what have you and seeing, hey, this lady did this once and it was $500. Now we've got her for 200 and some odd dollars. Do you think they're going through the footage and through the records and looking to see whether there's more there? I think that that is definitely possible. I mean, by tracking the credit cards that are used and things like that, it's definitely a possibility. I think, by tracking the credit cards that are used and things like

that, it's definitely a possibility. I think that Target has just gotten really good at making sure at the end of the day to go through that video and have their loss prevention officers really paying attention to who is at the checkout and what they're purchasing, what items are being scanned versus what items are actually being taken away and making sure to really keep track of all of that information and all of those transactions to make sure that people aren't doing what this suspect did. In the body camera footage that you all released with your press release, she doesn't look very happy. Yeah, you can definitely tell there's a bit of an attitude there. She was certainly disappointed to be arrested again. And I think she was surprised

that she was caught. Well, Lisa, I think we're going to see if we have you back a third time. We'll keep an eye on this investigation. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Now, after Marlena's first arrest, she posted this video on TikTok. Get ready with me to talk about the elephant in the room. As Velez puts on makeup without speaking, notice what's in the background. It's her booking photo from her first arrest. Below the video where Marlena Velez appears to revel in her newfound fame, she included the following statement. While there will be a time to discuss my wrongings, now is not that moment. And it doesn't mean I don't want to speak on it or take accountability for my actions. It means everything is still being dealt with in court.

So I just ask to please respect that. I also want to be clear that this doesn't define who I am and it doesn't reflect the person I strive to be. And get this, Marlena Velez, who had posted about making money on TikTok, is now asking for a public defender. That's right. She wants a free lawyer. She says in court documents that

she's indigent and has two dependents and she lists her income as zero. I want to tell you about Upside. It's a free app that gets you cash back on things like gas and restaurants. This is real cash back money that appears in your Upside app that you can transfer straight into your bank account. I used Upside when I went to Dunkin' Donuts recently for a cup of tea. I claimed an offer on the Dunkin' app, paid as usual using a card, and then I got cash back. It's so, so easy. You can also use Upside at places like Shell, Exxon, 7-Eleven, Chipotle, and that's just to name a few. There are so many more. To download Upside and start earning, click the link in the description or scan the QR code on your screen and use the promo code CrimeFix and get an extra 25 cents back on every gallon on your first tank

of gas. That's promo code CrimeFix for extra cash back. I want to bring in Kathleen Bogenschutz. She's a former prosecutor down there in Florida. So Katie, this case gets crazier and crazier. I didn't expect a second arrest, but also I'm not surprised. Nor should you be. The question is, so why is she out if you have all these arrests? Usually what happens if you're on bond in a case, that's an agreement between you, the defendant, and the state saying that I will come back to court and I promise to abide by all the laws. If you pick up another offense, the state can then revoke your bond. You broke your end of the deal, you're sitting in custody. And I'm oversimplifying it, but that is how people

end up in jail with the subsequent offense. In this case, the dates, as I will often say in my practice, they crossed. So she was not picked up at the scene at the first incident. She was picked up on, I think, November 21st. And the second incident was November 20th. So she was not out on bond when the second one occurred. And that's why we're not seeing like a second arrest or where she's sitting in custody because there was no bond. There was no violation of her bond conditions. The other thing is that she had a prior from last summer, your third petty theft turns into a felony in Florida. So I don't know if she has any priors prior to last summer, but that would be one of my big concerns if I was representing her. And that was going to be one of my questions for you because she pleaded no contest to the

charges in 2023 related to the theft from Walmart. Now we had the first and then we had the first arrest this year from November, where she was caught with the 500 or so dollars of under ringing items, according to the police in Cape Coral. Now we've got this second arrest where, you know, they were going the loss prevention people were going through and they're like, oh, that's that woman. That's her. And they find this third, the second incident at Target valued at 225. So now that's three. So can the prosecutor, the state attorney, put all three of those together and say, look,

this is her third time doing this. Now it is a felony. Can they lump that other one that she already pleaded no contest to in with that to create a felony charge? Generally speaking, no, because at the time that you commit the offense, you need to have the two prior convictions or withholds of adjudication. So because these two happened so close in time, that didn't occur. That doesn't mean that there aren't other offenses out there, though, that we don't know about. A lot of times a petty theft will get what's called a notice to appear

and won't even have an arrest. So it's basically a ticket giving you your court date, and that's within the discretion of anybody in law enforcement. The other thing is that you may be trying to, if you're the prosecutor, those amounts are very close together time-wise. And they're very close to the threshold for grand theft totally. So in 2018, over the summer, the statute for petty theft in Florida changed. It used to be petty theft was anything under $300. Now it's anything under $750. So if you were to aggregate those amounts and try to say that there was some kind of an organized scheme here to continue doing that, you could probably get it up to a felony amount. Or you charge them both as misdemeanors and use what's

called William's Rule, which is similar crime evidence. I mean, it was at the same store. So you use similar crimes evidence to bring them in to show that there was not any kind of a mistake. I mean, we've all used those checkout counters. It's easy to make a mistake if you don't scan things for a living. That's always going to be a defense there. But when you see somebody doing it on multiple occasions over a short period of time, that's when you can start using that as a prosecutor to say, hey, it's not like she missed this one chapstick. She missed $500 worth of stuff. Yeah, I remember I tell this story. I forgot to scan a gallon of milk last year, last winter, and I felt so bad about it. And I went back to Target and I paid for it. I mean, and that was like a gallon of milk. So and they were like, when I went back, they were like, okay. So it was kind of interesting. I probably thought it was crazy. But I was like, hey, I forgot to pay for this milk. And, you know, thank God I did, because who knows if I would have gotten in gotten in trouble.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there. What is really interesting to me about this is that the woman already pleaded no contest to doing this at the Walmart. She goes to Target and innocent until proven guilty, of course, Katie, on these things. But she's accused of now doing this twice within a short amount of time at Target. If you're loss prevention at Target, are you going to go back and look for this woman and all your stuff and go through maybe receipts and see if she's paying by credit card and looking for her name on the debit or credit card or what have you, however they can do this and seeing, oh my God, she's here twice a week doing this. Yeah. And that's when, so if you were able to, one of the easiest ways to do it would really be

to run credit cards, debit cards. Target has, you and I talked earlier, we're both moms, like we both shop at Target, standard. You know, Target has an app that you can scan for additional money. Oh, that's right. The red circle thing. Yes. To see when else this happened. And if she's always using the self-checkout line, it is entirely possible that there's more to come. It might just take a little bit of legwork. And one of the things that prosecutors often find is that loss prevention officers at these bigger stores, Walmart, Target, Kmart, even something like Publix, they've got very good surveillance and they're usually paid fairly well for what they do. So the corporate oligarchs out there, they don't take kindly to you messing with their bottom line. They know that there's slippage. They know that, that things go missing in the store. They've got,

you know, their stuff every month and they're going to go back through the surveillance. It is never worth it. Um, particularly somebody with, with good enough surveillance that you can pick out a tattoo, which I've actually done in the past. Somebody had a swirl tattoo on his shoulder and it was, you know, pretty, I mean, it was as good as a fingerprint. Yeah. I, whenever I'm in target and I, you know, occasionally Walmart too, I mean, those cameras are right there. They are right in your face. And I remember like the first time I ever saw it, I was like, Whoa, what is that? You know, cause you look up and you see yourself there, you know, especially like weekend day and you've got the ball cap on or whatever. And you're just like, Whoa, what is that? And then you're like, Oh, okay, you know, especially like weekend day and you've got the ball cap on or whatever. And you're just like, whoa, what is that? And then you're like, oh, OK, you know what's going on.

It's a loss prevention thing. Plus, they've got those cameras up top in the ceiling, the ones with the kind of globey looking thing on it. So they're watching from every angle. And I just don't know why anybody thinks they can get away with this stuff at all. One thing that is kind of confounding to me about this is the fact that I thought she was online bragging about being this influencer. I mean, her house looks like great and amazing on TikTok. I mean, it's like beautiful. I mean, the kitchen is amazing.

And I thought she was making all this money being a TikTok influencer standard to, or I guess high standard, if you want to say, you need a very low income, to put it a better way, to qualify for a public defender. And it really hasn't gone up very much over the past 10 or 15 years. And a clerk makes that determination. And another thing is that in Florida, when you fill out the public defender affidavit forms, it says on those forms that you are under oath and that it's another misdemeanor to lie about your property. So, I mean, it could be a situation where what you see on TV, on Instagram, on TikTok is not the real life she lives. Or it could be that there have been maybe some massaging of those numbers to get into the public defender realm for her. And I couldn't find what she was shoplifting for as a prosecutor. And even as a defense attorney, there's a special

spot in my heart for somebody that's, you know, maybe shoplifting baby formula or diapers or something like that, like the real necessities. But if it's cosmetics, that's when I start getting a little, where I start getting a little bit like, ooh, are we just doing this for fun now? Yeah, it looked like some clothes. The latest trip looked like some clothes. And then the last trip, it was one of those, you know, trendy mugs and all that stuff.

So we'll try to get a better detailing of that. Katie, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it as always. Good to see you. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.