Pennsylvania black woman set to sue Target after she’s detained over ‘stolen’ items. She goes out of her way to prove innocence: ‘have my receipt’

A Pennsylvania woman is now preparing legal action against Target, accusing a Cheltenham Township store of putting her through an ordeal over a cart of items she’d already paid for. The dispute stems from a stop that started near the store’s exit and ended in a back office, all captured on video and shared through the Instagram account @maci_mulatto. As first reported by Atlanta Black Star, the woman, who has not been publicly identified, later laid out her side of what happened, adding details not captured in the clips.

According to her account, she and her cousin had gone shopping together but checked out separately, since she finished first while her cousin was still browsing. “I asked the cashier, you know, is it cool? Because at this point, I’m already paid,” she said.

An employee then handed the pair a second cart to help manage the overflow at self-checkout, since her cousin, in her words, “had stuff spilling over the small side.”  The confusion over who had paid for what also came up at an Aldi in Minnesota, where staff confronted a customer over items she had already paid for.

She had a receipt to prove it

Once both had paid, the two headed to the in-store Starbucks, where she noticed someone watching them. “I saw the loss prevention office] stare, kind of looking jittery; I’m not going to lie. I thought he was going to try to steal our purses,” she said. She identified him as an employee with dreads, the same one seen in the video positioning himself to block the pair from leaving.

As she pushed her cart toward the door, an officer approached alongside that employee. “I did not take nothing from y’all’s store,” she told him. “I have my receipt, my purse is here, I let y’all go through my purse, all my items are right here.” The officer, identified as “Officer Tice,” told her she was under investigation and needed to come back inside. “We can go back to the office now, or we could go back in handcuffs; either way, we have to go back to the office,” he said.

Back inside, she walked straight to the cashier who’d rung her up. “Excuse me, ma’am, didn’t you just ring up my cart?” she asked. “They’re saying I stole this whole cart of stuff.” The employee did not appear to deny it on camera.

A second clip from the same account shows the loss prevention employee seated at a bank of monitors, reviewing footage before he finally spoke. “Alright, I checked it. You wasn’t lying. So that’s my apology. Um, here ya go your receipt,” he said.

She told Atlanta Black Star the officer never looked through her belongings before that point, and that the situation only escalated once store staff got involved: “That’s why I felt so powerless and unheard. Once the guy said I took everything in my cart, the officer immediately put his hands on the cart.” It’s a familiar complaint in these encounters, similar to this, a case out of Louisiana where a DSW location called police on a woman over shoes she’d walked in.

Target told Atlanta Black Star: “We deeply regret that this incident occurred, and we’ve apologized directly to the guest involved. We are reviewing the matter internally.” 

The woman, for her part, isn’t backing off legal action, arguing the officer largely followed the store’s lead rather than checking the facts himself: “The police officer didn’t investigate.” Whether that argument holds up in court will likely come down to how long she was held and what, if anything, gave staff reasonable suspicion in the first place, details that haven’t been made public yet.