Remember the pregnant Honolulu mom, who was accused of stealing a couple of sandwiches from a local Safeway last week?
Nicole Leszczynski and her husband were thrown into jail and their toddler taken into custody by Child Welfare Services all because they allegedly forgot to pay for a couple of chicken salad snacks they ate before leaving the store.
Well, hopefully the rest of Nicole’s pregnancy will be stress-free from here on out.
The 28-year-old mom, who made national headlines with her sandwich story, has been vindicated.
According to news reports, Safeway decided to calm the PR firestorm they got themselves into by dropping the shoplifting charges they filed against the soft-spoken mom and her spouse.
In a public statement released by Hawaii News Now, Safeway said it’s committed to serving families, but “it appears we may not have handled this matter in the best possible way.”
In addition, Nicole says, two days ago Safeway president of Northern California operations called to apologize for the incident that kept her apart from her two-year-old daughter for 19 hours.
“That’s kind of harsh to go to jail and have your daughter removed from your care for something like this,” Nicole told news reporters.
Despite the store’s apology, Nicole says she isn’t prepared to patronize Safeway any time soon. In fact, she says she still doesn’t understand why store management refused to let her pay for the sandwiches as soon as she realized she had forgotten to ring them up with the rest of her groceries.
“It seems like a lot of people are angry about it, as are we,” Nicole told reporters. “It seems like such an outrageous story.”
She’s right. Google “Safeway Sandwich Mom” and you’ll be greeeted with nearly one million results, most of them written by people who can’t believe the grocery store took such extreme measures.
Many moms, who chatted about Nicole’s fate on online parenting forums, spoke about thinking twice the next time they considered handing their screaming kid a snack off the shelf at Safeway or any other store.
The criminal litigation side of this story made be over, but I have a feeling that the civil side may be just beginning.
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