Last week a very tragic event happened here in the Chicagoland area. Five women were killed during, what is believed to be, a robbery at a Tinley Park Lane Bryant clothing store. One woman survived the ordeal and has been working with investigators to identify the suspect.
This has been on my mind because for a few reasons. First of all I shop at Lane Bryant, but haven’t been in a while since I started my Sew For A Year challenge. This is one of the stores that has size 14 for women — something that is extremely difficult to find. But the other thought was this took me back to when I was a store manager of a fabric store.
I kept having flashbacks of incidents where crazy things happened and one incident in particular keeps rolling over and over in my mind. I was working in the Evanston store one morning when in comes a woman dressed in a 3/4 length coat. I’d seen her before and thought today was odd because it was summer and the weather was warm. She had 4 children with her and as soon as they were inside the door the children went crazy, screaming, yelling, running around everywhere and ran into the back room!
I thought — oh no! Here we go, we’re being robbed! “Watch the woman” I yelled to my co-worker and then ran after the kids. They’d set the alarm off and I had to literally pull them out of the back room and tell them to get out of the store.
Meanwhile, the Mother was off on her strategic excursion to steal something. I stared her down and asked her to leave. I actually went right to the front door and stared at her until she left and asked my co-worker to stand by the phone in case we needed to call police.
I know she’d been back to the store – or others just like her because later in the week I had found several bolts of fabric stolen. The store is no longer there and I was only able to cope with the crazyness for just over a year before I got smart and got out.
My heart goes out to the Lane Bryant victims and their families, I can only imagine the fear they must have felt.
Sewing.for.Life! 