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9. Responding to the Worthy Story 9.1. Western Police Department “Borrowed Pants and a $12,000 Credit Card Bill” This is an incident that occurred about three years ago. I was working as a detective at a school. . . . It’s a predominantly white school—I would say 99 percent white. Even [Flores], one of the two suspects in the case I’m going to describe, though she had a Hispanic name, seemed white. . . . It’s an upper-middleclass school. . . . Smart kids, mostly kids that are college bound. . . . The people in this case were no exception. All three of them were pretty af›uent. . . . It was a lot nicer neighborhood than I live [in], with lovely homes and a bunch of horse property, so I would say all of them were upper middle class. . . . So I was assigned a case where a girl by the last name of [Adams] had lent her pants, believe it or not, to another girl by the name of [Catherine Lloyd]. In her pants she’d accidentally left the wallet, and in that wallet was a credit card that her mother had given Adams to buy some things. She mistakenly left that credit card in there when Lloyd borrowed the pants. So a few weeks later, Adams’s mother got her credit card statement with about $12,000 worth of charges on there.1 There were charges to a . . . restaurant with $300 bill. . . . Several charges to go to another popular restaurant . . . at $400 or $500 at a time. . . . Several charges came from some of your more expensive clothing stores. Obviously, when Adams’s mom got it, she thought that her daughter had charged up all the bills and things. She said, “No, Catherine Lloyd had the pants that contained the credit card for a week before I asked for it back, and that’s when all these charges were made.” 107 I contacted Catherine Lloyd, and she was seventeen years old at the time. She adamantly denied everything. She says she never touched the credit card and doesn’t know what I’m talking about. We went around and around and around about it and she continued to deny it. Adams told me that there would be another friend with Catherine Lloyd named [Susan Flores]. I contacted Flores. She denied it, denied it, denied it. So I started to go back to the different stores, sequentially going back in order so I could see if they remembered who charged these things. All of these stores remembered because it was such an elaborate bill and they remembered that the kid who paid for it was kind of young to have a credit card, but they didn’t check anything.2 They all described exactly what Catherine Lloyd and Susan Flores look like. [A detailed investigation followed, including photo lineups, interviews, and handwriting analysis.] So I went back to [Lloyd] with all of that evidence, and she still denied it. And she denied it and said, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. . . .” It was the same with Flores, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. . . .” [A former boyfriend then confesses that he had let Lloyd charge clothes at a boutique where he worked.] I go to Lloyd with that evidence, and she still denies it and says, “It wasn’t me, wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” At that point, I went to Lloyd’s home and talked to her parents . . . . I explained the whole situation, presented the evidence, and really kind of made a pitch for her to tell the truth. . . . If she continued to lie like this, she was going to be convicted of a felony, because that’s what that is. . . . Still, she denied it, denied it, denied it, and I left. The next morning . . . Lloyd’s mom and dad march Catherine into my of‹ce with all the items she had charged up. She broke down and started to cry and said that in fact she had charged all these things and now wanted to repent. I asked her who was with her when she did all these things, and she said it was Susan Flores. We bring Flores down, and Flores still denied it and denied it and denied it. She said, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” At that time, Lloyd was about seventeen and about nine months. In our juvenile system, if you’re within six months of being eighteen...

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