The popular gun and sporting stores Academy Sports actually fired three of their employees after they searched for a thief who had just stolen one of their guns.
The store personnel never found the thief but because they went outside the store looking for him, they got canned.
Here’s more via Fox Business:
Three employees at a sporting goods store in Louisiana were terminated from their jobs after attempting to stop a shoplifter who allegedly stole a pistol.
Michelle Sutton, along with two other unidentified workers at the Academy Sports + Outdoors in Metairie, Louisiana, said that the shoplifting incident happened Dec. 16.
The sales associates said that they thought they were about to make a sale and were showing a customer a pistol, when he took off with the firearm.
Sutton, who was working as a team lead at the store, said once she received word on her radio, she immediately dropped what she was doing and jumped into action.
“I just took off,” Sutton told local TV news station WGNO. “I knew I needed some form of way to help the police.”
Sutton said that she and two other employees began looking for the suspected thief, but they were not able to locate him.
The Jefferson Parish Sherriffs Office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Four days after the incident, Sutton said that the outdoor retail chain’s firearm compliance personnel terminated her, as well as the two other employees for their response to the theft.
Sutton said that they were let go due to Academy Sports + Outdoors policy on loss prevention, which states that employees are not allowed to chase or physically restrain a fleeing person suspected of theft.
“Because we did run out of 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.
I could maybe understand taking this severe action if the employees had tried to restrain the thief in some way. But they never even found him. They were simply looking for him to aid the police in their ability to catch him.