Woman Pleads Her Case During Target Arrest, Claiming She Has Plenty of Cash

A woman detained inside an Illinois Target offered police an unusual reason to believe she had no intention of shoplifting: she was carrying a $3,000 purse.

“Do you see? I don’t steal,” she insisted. “I have on a $3,000 purse. I don’t steal. This is my favorite Target.”

The exchange came during a March 9, 2025, retail-theft arrest involving Oak Lawn police. The body-camera footage resurfaced on YouTube on October 8, 2026, attracting more than 111,000 views by the following morning.

The woman maintained that she had been looking for her cousin, who had the money to pay for their clothing purchases through Apple Pay. Store employees described something considerably different, and an officer who initially assured the women that neither would be arrested eventually changed course.

A Shopping Trip Takes a Turn

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At first, an officer suggested the two women might receive a warning or ticket. “You guys are not gonna be arrested,” he told them, explaining that officers would collect their information before allowing them to leave.

A Target loss-prevention employee then described the incident to another officer. According to the employee, the women had put clothing into a bag taken from another customer and tried to leave with the merchandise.

The woman challenged that account immediately. Her phone was dead, she explained, and her cousin had the money on Apple Pay. She said she spotted her cousin downstairs near an escalator and went looking for her so they could pay.

“I didn’t leave out the door,” she insisted, saying she had turned around when store employees called her back.

As she tried to explain that she was cooperating with security, she repeatedly used the word “applying.”

“You’re applying for a job?” an officer interrupted.

“No, I’m saying I’m applying,” she replied before returning to her explanation.

She also objected to how the store employee had characterized their intentions. “You just flip everything and just say what you wanted to say,” she complained.

There Was One Important Line

The officer explained that the last point of purchase was upstairs and that taking unpaid merchandise beyond it could constitute theft, even without leaving the building.

The woman maintained that she had never intended to leave without paying. “I’m not no booster. I don’t steal. I don’t have no reason to steal,” she said, also mentioning that the pair had just come from church.

Illinois law makes an important distinction here. Under 720 ILCS 5/16-25, concealing unpaid merchandise and carrying it beyond the last payment station allows a judge or jury to infer an intention to steal. Leaving through the front door is not a prerequisite, but passing the registers is not automatic proof of guilt either. Intent and the surrounding circumstances still matter.

That puts the competing descriptions at the center of the case. Target’s employee described concealed clothing and an attempted departure. The woman described an interrupted effort to find the person who could pay, insisting that she complied when employees stopped her.

When an officer eventually told her to stand because she was under arrest for retail theft, she continued to protest.

“There’s no way that I can talk to the manager?” she asked. “I literally didn’t know that I was gonna get in trouble for looking for my cousin.”

She repeatedly offered to pay for the merchandise before asking what would happen to her purse and phone during booking. The other woman was allowed to leave.

An Expensive Argument

The purse became an unlikely centerpiece of the confrontation. The woman’s reasoning was straightforward: someone carrying an accessory worth thousands of dollars would have no reason to steal comparatively inexpensive merchandise.

Yet having money and intending to pay are separate questions. A national study of more than 43,000 American adults found self-reported histories of shoplifting across income groups, including among higher earners. The research, based on surveys conducted in 2001 and 2002, measured whether respondents had ever shoplifted, so it cannot establish their financial circumstances when those thefts occurred.

One famous example is actress Winona Ryder, who paid more than $3,000 for a jacket and two tops during a 2001 shopping trip to Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, according to Associated Press reporting. The same visit resulted in her 2002 conviction for grand theft and vandalism involving approximately $5,500 in other merchandise.

That documented case illustrates why the ability to make an expensive purchase cannot, by itself, settle whether someone intended to pay for other items.

In Oak Lawn, the woman’s purse may have been her strongest rhetorical argument, but the legal question concerned what happened to the unpaid clothing. Her insistence that she never left Target remained central to her explanation even as officers prepared to take her to the station.

“I’m getting a lawyer,” she said.

All parties are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.