SF Woman Who Coughed and Said She Had COVID While Robbing a Walgreens Found Guilty
A crime that was arguably over-charged in the early pandemic has resulted in a possible 20-year federal sentence for one woman a steep price to pay for stealing some stuff from a Walgreens, which as we ve seen, is a pretty common occurrence.
At issue in the April 2020 theft by Carmelita Barela and Rosetta Shabazz is that the two women coughed in the direction of store employees at Walgreens near Civic Center (possibly this one) and claimed to have COVID while they pilfered items and left the store. As SFist noted at the time, they were soon arrested and charged in federal court with robbery affecting interstate commerce, a crime that comes with far stiffer penalties than merely brazen shoplifting.