Friedman’s Home Improvement Store shoplifters nailed

They were a few tools short of a toolbox, you might say. That’s how it appeared after Sonoma police deputies were dispatched at 12:42 p.m. on Tuesday to Friedman’s Home Improvement Store on Broadway, after a store employee reported that a man had run out of the store carrying over $400 worth of tools he failed to pay for.

The employee provided a physical description of the suspect, who he witnessed getting into the front passenger seat of a waiting silver Chevrolet sedan. According to deputies, the alert employee wrote down the license plate of vehicle as it sped away.

By around 2 p.m., the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office property crimes detectives had discovered the unoccupied Chevy parked in the parking lot of the K-Mart store at 261 N McDowell Blvd. in Petaluma. Officers staked out the vehicle and observed two men exit the K-mart store and get into the silver sedan. The subjects were detained and the witness from the Friedman’s store was driven to the scene and positively identified one of the male subjects as the one who fled the store carrying boxes of unpaid merchandise.

Deputies report finding Makita and Milwaukee tools within the suspect vehicle, which were determined to have been stolen from the home improvement store. The recovered merchandise was valued at approximately $865.

The suspects were identified as 34-year-old Kasey Robert Crunk, from Windsor, and 28-year-old Nicholas Alexander Barnes, “a Healdsburg transient,” according to the Sheriff’s report. Crunk and Barnes were booked into custody at the Sonoma County Jail on suspicion of shoplifting, possession of stolen property and conspiracy to commit a crime.