Jewish ‘kop’ uses wits to catch a thief
Perpetrator, caught red-handed, shouts: ‘I am Muslim, you are Jewish. You are all greedy, why can’t you just let it go?’
In a supreme case of intuitive problem-solving, 24-year-old New Yorker Dina Wohlhendler quick-wittedly busted a debit card thief in Manhattan who had absconded with her wallet just moments before.
After noticing her wallet was missing while on a shopping trip last week, Wohlhendler assumed she had forgotten it at work, Vos Iz Neias reported. But on her way back to her office, she received an SMS notice from her bank, informing her that $211 had been charged to her card at a nearby Urban Outfitters a few minutes earlier.
She quickly made her way to the store, but the clerk there couldn’t help her identify the thief. Wohlhendler then left the Urban Outfitters to scan the Manhattan streets, and acting on instinct, she entered a Best Buy, where she observed a woman with an Urban Outfitters bag at the counter making a purchase.
Moving closer, she was able to observe her own name on the card. “I started yelling at her. At first she denied that the card was mine, but then she started yelling at me,” said Wohlhendler. “She started running away towards the back of the store, but I ran after her, calling for security. She started throwing the merchandise from Urban Outfitters at me, then some cash, then my wallet, screaming, ‘Here is your stuff back, it is just a mix-up.’”
After store security detained the thief and the police were summoned, the suspect said that “I am Muslim, you are Jewish. You are all greedy, why can’t you just let it go?” according to Wohlhendler, an Orthodox Jewish resident of Borough Park.
The suspect, who was arrested on charges of grand larceny and possession of stolen goods, was later identified by police as parolee Tywanda Deckard, who had been released two months earlier after being convicted on two counts of identify theft.
