Louisiana Academy Sports and Outdoors employees fired for chasing suspected gun thief

Three Louisiana sports store employees claim they were fired for chasing a suspected gun thief out of the store in a suspected shoplifting earlier this month.

A sales associate at the Academy Sports and Outdoors store in Metairie, LA believed they were completing a sale with a pistol on the evening of Dec. 16, when the customer suddenly ran off after being handed the firearm.

“I just took off,” Michelle Sutton, one of the team leads, told WGNO after hearing the call out on her radio. “I knew I needed some form of way to help the police.”

Sutton says two store associates joined her in failed pursuit of the shoplifter.

Sutton claimed the sporting goods store’s firearm compliance personnel terminated all three employees for breaking the store’s policy four days after the incident.

“Because we did run out the building, even though I and the other associate did stay on the sidewalk, it fell under [that] we left the front porch, as they call it,” Sutton explained.

The store’s anti-theft policy prohibits associates from chasing fleeing suspects while managers are permitted to detain those who leave the store by asking them to return to the building at a “non-threatening distance,” according to the outlet.

Sutton slammed the store for not giving clearer instructions on how to obtain details of the suspect to report to law enforcement.

“There’s no clarification on getting (the suspect’s) location for police,” Sutton told the outlet. “I know my store director had said that they want you to be able to get the make and model of a vehicle, you know, maybe a direction in which way the vehicle went.”

“Every store that sells firearms, especially pistols that are concealable, need to have clear policy,” Sutton added. “They need to have extra training. They need to prepare for the unexpected.”

Academy Sports and Outdoors has 282 locations, predominantly in the South, Southeast and Midwest, and has its corporate offices in Katy, Texas, a suburb of Houston.

The store sells hunting, fishing and camping gear, along with “sports and leisure products.”

Metairie is the largest community in Jefferson Parish and is located directly Northwest of New Orleans, sitting on the south of Lake Pontchartrain.

In July, a Colorado grocery store employee was fired after he recorded three shoplifters stealing approximately worth of laundry detergent on Father’s Day.

King Soopers employee, Santino Burrola, was alerted to a possible shoplifting in progress and was told by the store’s person in charge to get a picture of the license plate and immediately ran out of the store following the three men.

A day later Burrola was told he was suspended, and a week later the store terminated his employment.