"It's just getting worse": 2 homeless people arrested for attacking Sacramento-area thrift store owners
NORTH HIGHLANDS — Two people, believed to be homeless, are behind bars charged with assault with a deadly weapon after the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office says they attacked the owners of Dollar Thrift.
Melissa and Thomas Jones have owned the thrift Store off Auburn Boulevard for seven years, and they say, recently, things have escalated. At around 10:00 a.m. on Monday, they asked a couple to move along from sleeping in front of their door so they could open for customers.
"Unfortunately, up until this point, the aggressiveness has been verbal abuse. Today, it was like a bar fight," Thomas Jones said.
The couple described the moment things turned violent.
"As soon as we said, 'You got to go,' she hit me two times this thing attached to a string," Thomas said. "And then my wife went to stop her. She cracked with a full blow to her head."
Sergeant Amar Gandhi, a spokesperson for the sheriff's office, said Sherinda Owens and Damariay Smith are facing charges of assault with a deadly weapon.
"This could have gone tragically worse," Ghandi said. "She's unarmed. All she's trying to do is open the shop up so customers can come in."
Thomas Jones said that in recent years, issues with the homeless loitering around their business have been getting worse. Dollar Thrift, just like the name implies, sells all clothes for just $1.00. They feel they have been abandoned by local leaders who they think can do more to support and protect small businesses.
"We can't pick up and leave. We're not the Rite Aids. We can't say, 'We got money in the bank.' This is money out of our pocket. Sometimes, we don't even make a profit," Thomas said.
They want to see more programs in place to support locally owned stores that are the target of vandalism or violent crime.
"Why is it on small businesses? When is some of our local politicians going to step up for us?" Thomas said. "We have to fight that as a community, and the only way we can do that is if the politicians are out here going, 'The mom-and-pop shop is the backbone of America.' "
They were also the targets of vandals last year when someone wrote profanity on their back windows in feces. They feel law enforcement's hands are tied because they can only intervene after a situation turns violent.
"This is the tip of an iceberg of a big problem of what's going on right now," Gandhi said. "It's these folks getting impacted and have to deal with this day in and day out."
The Jones family says if the crime gets bad enough to force them out of business, it will impact more than just the livelihoods of their family of seven but have a crippling ripple effect on their customers.
"What about the single mom with two kids who depend on getting quality clothes from this store?" Jones said. "The community depends on us, needs us."
Melissa and Thomas Jones suffered minor injuries but fear that next time, things could escalate to something far more dangerous.