 |
| Dunbar after his arrest in Boystown on December 12. (Cook County Sheriff’s Office) |
UPDATE 2:03PM—CWB has reviewed a copy of the court date information that a 7-Eleven manager says the store was provided. The court date on that paper is in January. However, the case number and time of occurrence on the sheet provided by 7-Eleven do not match the Dunbar allegation.
——–
We don’t usually look into retail theft cases, but when we saw bail set at a whopping $50,000 for a Boystown shoplifting arrestee, we had to dig deeper. Meet Darnell Dunbar.
An employee of the 7-Eleven store at Halsted and Roscoe was pursuing Dunbar up Halsted Street around 1 o’clock on the afternoon of December 12 when they flagged down a passing patrol car.
Dunbar was arrested, charged with shoplifting, and sent to jail in lieu of the almost unheard of $50,000 bail.
Why $50,000 bail for a simple shoplifting? We took a look into Dunbar’s past performance:
• His Cook County Criminal Court record has more than 60 entries under the names Darnell Dunbar, Darnell Dunbar Jr., Kevin Dunbar, Dashal Dunbar, Deon Price, Danzal Beacon, Dannzal Ebacon, and Dashell Micheal. He has also given police at least seven different birth dates.
• He’s been on parole since July after serving about 3 years of a 6-year sentence for robbery. He previously served 4 years for another robbery and two 4-year sentences for narcotics—once in 2002 and again in 2005.
• Remarkably, five of Cook County’s notoriously-lenient judges have actually sentenced him to serious prison sentences for simple shoplifting in the past—1 year, 13 months, 18 months, 2 years, and 30 months.
It looks like 7-Eleven is his lucky, number though. All charges in the December 12 case were dropped on Friday because, court records say, the store failed to show up in court.
