LINCOLN, Neb. April 7 2013 (AP) — A Lincoln woman has been sentenced to six months in jail for sending her 11-year-old son into a grocery store to shoplift, then abandoning him in the store's parking lot.
Batrina Perez, 31, was sentenced Friday in Lancaster County Court for the October incident, the Lincoln Journal Star reported (http://bit.ly/X4jF1l).
Prosecutors said Perez gave her son a list of food to steal and sent him into a local grocery store. Store security stopped the boy when he wheeled a cart filled with nearly $200 worth of food outside the store without paying.
A store surveillance camera captured images of Perez driving off when she saw her son had been stopped, prosecutors said. Police said she later told officers her son was lying about her ordering him to steal the food.
Perez later pleaded no contest to negligent child abuse, a misdemeanor.
"It is one thing for this 31-year-old mother to have her own shoplifting rap sheet that dates back to 1998," Lancaster County Judge Gale Pokorny said Friday. "It is quite another to be the role model for her young children instilling values and shaping morals that will come back to haunt them for the rest of their lives."
