In a case of daughter-thinks-she-knows-best, a woman was arrested when deputies say she stole cigarettes from her elderly, emphysemic mother and refused to give them back.
While the elderly woman was hospitalized for problems related to her condition, the daughter went to her mother’s apartment and stole three cartons of cigarettes worth $225, according to a Pima County Sheriff’s report.
When the mother was discharged from the hospital and returned home, she couldn’t find her smokes and called her daughter who admitted the theft. The daughter, who lives in the same complex, “took those cartons of cigarettes home to later throw into a Dumpster, permanently depriving her mother of her cigarettes,” the deputy wrote in the September report.
No amount of reasoning on the part of the deputy could convince the daughter to return the cigarettes. She told the deputy she threw them away because they are bad for her mother’s health. She didn’t keep them for herself because they were regular cigarettes and she only smokes menthols.
“Over my dead body. My mother is not getting her cigarettes back,” the woman told the deputy, repeatedly. Adding, “If I have to go to jail over it, so be it.”
As a prelude to the arrest, the deputy began reading the woman her Miranda rights, but “she stated she already had her rights read before and she knew what they were because she watched ‘Law & Order,’ ” according to the report.
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