A mother and daughter are the most recent criminal duo to face charges under Michigan’s new Retail Fraud Act, which authorities are hoping will help to stem the tide of financial losses suffered by retailers across the state.
55-year-old Sue Surian and her daughter, 29-year-old Lisa Surian, were arraigned on Tuesday in the Muskegon District Court on felony charges. They are both facing single counts of first-degree retail fraud, and organized retail crime, which could result in up to five years in prison for each charge and fines of up to $10,000.00 or three times the value of the stolen property. Lisa Surian is also looking at a habitual offender charge, which may increase her sentence.
The pair, who were caught on camera stealing baby formula from a Meijer store in Norton Shores, are not new to the art of the “five finger discount” having been convicted only last month in Montcalm County for shoplifting items from a Greenville Walmart. They were both put on probation, but apparently they felt that that didn’t count for much.
It was only a week after their Montcalm County conviction that the pair were photographed by a surveillance camera leaving the Norton Shores Meijer with stolen baby formula. Norton Shores police circulated the images. It didn’t take long before the sticky-fingered duo were identified and arrested.
It no longer matters what the value of the stolen items is
Under Michigan’s new Organized Retail Crime law, it no longer matters what the value of the stolen items is. All the prosecutor needs to do for the charge to be a felony, is to prove that the thief intended to resell the items. Before this new law hit the books, the charge for shoplifting was always a misdemeanor unless the value of the merchandise was more than $1,000.
The problem with that, authorities believed, is that it allowed too many loopholes for people who were familiar with the law and knew how to work it to their advantage. Recently, investigators were able to send a man to prison under this new law. He had a history of 30 prior retail fraud convictions, but never received more than a brief jail sentence for each of them, because the items he stole never exceeded $200 in value. The new law has changed that.
The Surians have been linked to multiple baby formula thefts across portions of Western Michigan. Meijer and Walmart stores in Cascade Township are both claiming to have been robbed by the pair, along with a number of other thefts that took place in Muskegon, Jenison, and Wyoming.