Three teenagers spotted early Wednesday morning at Wal-Mart at Buffalo Ridge Plaza in The Villages were found to have more than $1,200 in stolen cigarettes.
A Sumter County sheriff’s deputy was on patrol at 1:53 a.m. when he spotted the trio leaving the store carrying balled-up Wal-Mart shopping bags. When they saw the deputy, they quickly got into a Toyota and began to drive out of the parking lot. The deputy ran the vehicle’s license plate and learned that the vehicle was registered in Tampa “where it is known to me a good portion of snatch-and-grab theft case suspects generally travel from to commit crimes out of their jurisdiction where they are not easily recognized,” the deputy wrote in the arrest report.
The Toyota was pulled over at a Circle K service station at Southern Trace Plaza.
A subsequent search of the vehicle turned up eight unopened cartons of Marlboro 100 cigarettes and 98 unopened packs of Newport 100 cigarettes. The deputy learned that a large amount of cigarettes had been reported stolen from a Wal-Mart store in Bushnell. Video surveillance from the store linked the three teens in the Toyota to the theft of the cigarettes in Bushnell.
The three 18-year-olds, all from Tampa, were identified as Kameron Khalid Palmer, Raekwon D’Morris Willis and Jakobe Maurice Cotney. They were arrested on third-degree felony charges of retail theft and booked at the Sumter County Detention Center.
