By Milt Harris ——Bio and Archives--July 20, 2023
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Imagine that you’re a dedicated employee that works in a retail store and you see thieves blatantly making off with a cartload of merchandise. That’s exactly the situation Santino Burrola found himself in last month.
Burrola works for a King Soopers grocery store in Centennial, Colorado. On June 18th he was told that three men were attempting to make off with a cart full of laundry detergent. Laundry detergent has become a hot item on the black market specifically in Colorado. Probably because weak, woke companies like King Soopers do everything, but load the cart for them. Anyway, Burrola describes it this way: “Sure enough, when I looked there was a guy already half-headed out with a cart full of laundry detergent, scent boosters what have you.”
Burrola went on to say that: “My first instinct was to record,” so he pulled out his phone and followed what turned out to be a trio of thieves out the door.
The three stooges then ran over to a Chevy Trax, with a license plate concealed with tin foil and began shoveling the merchandise into the car. Burrola, who was recording the whole episode, can be heard on the video saying: “Really bro? You gotta resort to this? The economy’s not that bad.”
Then as the stooges hopped into their clown car, Burrola calmly swiped the foil off of the license plate and got a perfectly clear shot of it as they drove off. He then called the police and reported what had happened.
Thanks to Burrola's efforts, investigators were able to locate the registered owner of the stooge’s getaway vehicle, who claimed that he had loaned the car to a friend. Based on that information, the friend was then tracked down, arrested, and questioned about the other two stooges. The “friend/suspect” claimed that he went to the light rail station and picked up two other guys by offering them a chance to make some extra money. He told police that the men told him that their names were “Robert and Bugsy.”
Burrola’s video has gone viral with media outlets around the world picking it up after his video garnered over 1.5 million views on TikTok and over five million views on Instagram.
Upon arriving for his next shift, which was shortly after his video was posted and the first stooge was arrested, Burrola was called into his bosses office and was suspended immediately pending other action. A week later, he was fired.
Kroger, the owner of King Sooper stores, claim they have a strict policy concerning employees confronting shoplifters. However, should that apply to Burrola? He never confronted the thieves; he simply filmed them. No, it seems to me that Kroger has gone so woke that they feel it’s better to lose inventory to theft, than to stand up and risk being called racist or worse. Hard working people like Santonio Burrola are nothing more than collateral damage to the left. Burrola did the right thing. His dedication and intelligence was on full display and it led to the arrest of the bad guys. He should have been honored, but in a leftist run society he was fired because he cared.
Another sad commentary on the society we live in, is that Burrola has been accused of being a racist because the thieves were Hispanic. In an interview with the New York Post, he explained his actions this way: “I didn’t see color when I confronted them, I’ve seen criminals, white, black, brown, purple, it didn’t matter, a crime was being committed and wrong is wrong and a crime is a crime. Let me tell you something, if something is happening right in front of me, I’m gonna make it my business.”
The only bright spot in this story is that a GoFundMe campaign was started by the Burrola family in order to help him recover some lost wages and help fund his move from Colorado to Florida. To date the fund has raised in excess of $25,000.
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This isn’t the first time that Kroger has punished the good and allowed the evil to triumph. Last August in Aurora, Colorado, a security guard at another King Sooper store, was punched after getting into it with a shoplifter. Jesse Sims was fired over the incident. In an interview with Fox31’s Problem Solvers team he stated that: “I absolutely was fired unfairly for defending myself. I’ve had shoplifters come in, walk over, grab something off the shelf, look at me and go, ‘Yeah, I’ve got it. You can’t touch me. You can’t do nothing,” and walk right out the door. It’s a free-for-all. A majority of our criminal element that is doing this, know our policies. Know we can’t touch them. And they know if we call law enforcement, it could be two to four hours on average, sometimes two to three days before they (police) get in to do a report.”
Sims claims to have been assaulted at least five times by shoplifters over the past four years while working for King Soopers. A video reviewed by the Problem Solvers team from July 2020 showed Sims being punched in the face by a suspected thief before Sims eventually took him down and held the man until Aurora police arrived.
So let’s get this straight, Kroger rewards an employee that has been assaulted five times in four years with a pink slip. That doesn’t sound like a thank-you to me. It also doesn’t sound like a company looking out for their employees.
Problem Solvers also reported on another incident that occurred last November. At that time a man using a box cutter to remove the security strap, stole a cell phone and tried to escape. As he was fleeing, he dropped the box cutter which one of the employees, Teresa Maldonado saw and began to yell, “He’s got a knife!” “He’s got a knife!”
As the suspect reached for the box cutter another employee, Greg McArthur got the drop on him. He explained the confrontation this way: “I see him turn, there’s a knife in his hand. I see the knife. So I have an angle to wrap him, so I wrap him up, take him down, grabbed his left hand and remove the knife."
At that point another employee, Naghi Salimi, along with two good Samaritans helped McArthur restrain the thief. While two other employees Pressley Swenson and Julie Olivett phoned the police.
I’m sure you can guess the results of this episode. Kroger saw fit to fire all five employees that were involved. That’s right, Teresa Maldonado, Greg McArthur, Naghi Salimi, Julie Olivett and Pressley Swanson were all terminated for doing the right thing.
After the firings, Olivett told Problem Solvers that: "King Soopers said if the police weren’t called and we would have let him go, then none of us would have been fired."
In one area of Colorado alone, Kroger has fired seven employees in less than a year. Their crime, choosing dedication over becoming woke and brain dead to reality. Sounds like a good time to shake Kroger and their subsidiaries out of their slumber. Perhaps a boycott would help to revive them.
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Milt spent thirty years as a sales and operations manager for an international manufacturing company. He is also a four-time published author on a variety of subjects. Now, he spends most of his time researching and writing about conservative politics and liberal folly.