Two clerks from a Northern California 7-Eleven convenience store are under investigation for their roles in stopping a would-be robber from stealing cigarettes. A viral video of the incident captured the physical confrontation during which one clerk held the thief down while the other beat him repeatedly with a large stick.
The video uploaded to Twitter on July 29, geotagged from Stockton, California, shows a masked man standing behind the store’s checkout counter, sweeping tobacco products and other items into a trashcan. This same suspect is believed to have robbed the 7-Eleven location two other times in the preceding 24 hours, stealing cigarettes during the first incident and then returning the following night to demand money before stealing food and fleeing. In both cases, as with the incident captured on video, the man indicated that he had a gun and threatened to shoot store clerks and customers.
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During the third robbery, the thief attempted to get away with the trashcan full of stolen items, only to be blocked by the two clerks. While the larger of the two men wrestled him to the ground, the other one grabbed a large wooden stick and began beating the suspect on the legs, striking him more than two dozen times.
As the suspect began to cry out for mercy, Louis Benton, the customer who filmed the incident, intervened and threw the battered thief out of the store. “It came to a point where it got a little excessive so I was kind of like, ‘Yo, you know, we got to chill, we got to relax,’” Benton told ABC10. “Those two workers who protected their store, they did a courageous act. I believe that if I wasn’t there that guy would probably be more hurt than he was.”
But while many online praised the clerks’ response, others predicted that California’s “soft-on-crime” approach might create a bigger problem for the two men.
At this point, it remains uncertain if the act of vigilante justice will be met with criminal charges. However, Stockton Police Department announced in a recent update that both the robberies and the assault are now under investigation, and all police findings will be referred to the San Joaquin County district attorney for review. The DA will then decide whether the assault constitutes a criminal offense.
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