A NJ man who served 15 years in prison for robbing a shoe store attempted to rob that same shoe store the day after he was released from prison. Christopher Miller, 40, was released from jail Friday, and his first stop as a free man on Saturday was at the Stride Rite shoe store in Toms River—the same place he robbed in 1999. "I knew who he was right away," the 43-year-old manager of Stride Rite, who worked there in 1999 when the first robbery occurred, told the Post. "I just think [he came back] because he didn’t get anything the last time."
In 1999, then 25-year-old Miller tied up the manager, who was alone at the time, threatening her with a box cutter. On Saturday, Miller was more aggressive with her and a teenage employee. He ripped the drawer out of the cash register and took the $389 inside; when the two employees refused to go to a backroom or give him their car keys, he took their phones and ran. Police caught up to him down the block.
"I have no idea what he was thinking," Officer Ralph Stocco from the Toms River Police Department told the Post. "We thought it was extremely strange ourselves that he would just rob the same store a second time so many years later." Miller has been charged with robbery and is being held on $100,000 bail. Toms River Police Chief Mitchell Little told NBC he thinks Miller just wanted to go back to jail.
"Maybe that's the only life he knows, and the only thing he could think of was going back to the same store and doing the same crime again—getting caught and going back where he was taken care of and told what to do and getting meals and shelter and everything else," he said.
