THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 6, 1996 TAG: 9606060362
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Charlise Lyles
LENGTH: 57 lines
Possibly, the suspect is a new mother, in her 20s, probably not nursing. She's unarmed, but tough.
And, according to police, she's a robber.
On May 11, about 8 p.m., she entered a Food Lion on Military Highway in Chesapeake. Past cashiers, produce, canned goods to the infants aisle she went.
There she loaded four cases of baby formula into a shopping cart, then headed for the exit. When a store manager tried to stop her, she duked him in the face.
With loot worth about $250, she leaped into a getaway car with two male accomplices.
Police need your help in finding her.
Perhaps, if they listen closely for the sound of a baby's cry, it might lead straight to the perpetrator.
So who is this suspect?
Perhaps a welfare mother whose monthly check from Aid to Families with Dependent Children ran out.
Whatever the cause, her baby cries.
Or maybe, baby isn't crying hungry yet. But mommy's stocking up for the hard times ahead when Virginia's tough welfare reform law takes effect.
Come 1998, reform will require recipients to work for benefits. And within two years all checks will stop. Like everybody else, welfare mothers will be expected to find steady work. The state will aid with day care, health care and transportation costs for a while.
It's tough on mommy, and rightfully so. But children will bear the brunt of the tough love. Many needs, including nutrition, will no doubt go wanting.
Perhaps the perpetrator already has a job. She's one of the working poor, what most reformed welfare mothers will graduate to, tending a minimum-wage grill somewhere. In 1993, 7.6 percent of Virginia's children belonged to working-poor families, just slightly lower than the national average.
Clinton is expected to approve an increase in the federal minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 by 1997 - so that a full-time job means $206 a week, $10,712 a year.
But that still leaves a working mother of two under the poverty level - in 1992, $11,186 for a family of three. And that means the cupboard may still be bare of formula.
Chesapeake police officer Elizabeth Jones speculates about a black market, because there have been other baby-formula heists. Recently, police arrested two Portsmouth women for stealing formula from other stores.
Jones suspects that the formula is fenced to a middle man or a mom and pop store. Or maybe the latest suspect will sell it right out of the getaway car. Then she and her boyfriends will split the spoils.
That means there are enough babies out there crying hungry and the price of formula is so high that a thieving opportunist can take advantage.
Hard times, Dickensian welfare reform and a criminal minimum wage make the fleeting formula thief a phantom of the baby-wailing to come.
I wonder . . . just who should the cops be going after? by CNB