Ongoing Bookstore thefts result in arrest of grad student
An arrest was made Monday after the USU bookstore notified police that dozens of brand new textbooks totaling upwards of $7,000 were recently discovered missing, said Sgt. Jessica Elder of the USU Police Department.
Elder said the individual arrested is Logan resident Landon Putnam, 24, a USU graduate and employee of the campus admissions office.
“He was pretty quiet,” said arresting officer Sutton Hanzalik. “He struggled on being honest at first, because he’s never been in that position. He doesn’t have a criminal record.”
Elder said the books were taken throughout the course of the current academic year piece by piece. The red flag went up for employees, she said, when they began to see multiple, high-price titles coming back within a short time frame.
An individual is required to show a school ID whenever they return books, she said. There are multiple satellite locations in the area that buy back textbooks, and they all keep track of which books are returned.
“Through our physical inventory process and review of our buyback information,” said USU Bookstore Director David Parkinson, “we discovered some anomalies that were tied to Mr. Putnam.”
He said that allegedly there were a lot of buyback transactions with his name on them, which prompted him to give the transaction information, book titles and dollar amounts to USU police.
“Basically this guy went into the bookstore several times over the school year,” Elder said, “and was taking one or two books at a time. We’ve got roughly 44 books that have been stolen. In a five-day period, 40 books were sold back.”
After the arrest, Hanzalik said he interviewed Putnam, who said money was tight for he and his family, and he recently had a baby girl.
Allegedly, Putnam started taking books because he could not afford them as a student, Hanzalik said. In many cases, he said, after people start stealing it becomes hard for them to stop.
“He felt guilty, is what his statement was,” Hanzalik said. “The bottom line is would he have ever came to us and said, ‘Hey I made a bad choice, I’m here to confess’? No, we had to take the initiative to speak with him.”
The amount of money that Elder said was profited from the resale of the textbooks is set at $3,117. When combined with the cost of the books taken, the total is almost $10,000, which makes it a second degree felony theft.
“The biggest sufferer here is the bookstore,” Elder said. “These books were stolen brand new, in shrink wrap. They’ll never be able to sell those new now, so they lose all that money now on the books. It’s a big hit for the bookstore.”
She said if convicted, Putnam would face the second degree charge for taking the books and also be charged with third degree felony theft by deception for trying to sell the books back.
“He came down (Tuesday), and he knew I was going to book him,” Hanzalik said. “He and his wife are going to work through it. We all make choices. He’s not a bad kid, he just made a very bad choice.”
The issue that makes a crime like this worse, Hanzalik said, is that it is an accumulation of repeated offenses, rather than a one-time thing in which the perpetrator immediately sees the error of his ways. During questioning, Hanzalik said Putnam was cooperative.
“It could be a great learning experience,” Hanzalik said. “I can’t say I haven’t made mistakes as a kid.”
Hanzalik also said there was a trust violation and he will have to notify Putnam’s employer, the admissions office, of what happened.
The bookstore has sustained book theft in the past but nothing on a scale this large, Elder said. In the past, she said the highest number of books taken was about 10.
Parkinson said the bookstore relies on video surveillance and aggressive customer service as its loss prevention strategy. This semester the bookstore did not require students to remove their backpacks before entering the store.
“We felt that asking people to leave their belongings outside of the store was basically and implication of a lack of trust,” Parkinson said. “That just means we have to step it up with our in-store activities.”
The bookstore will not go back to a no-backpack policy, Parkinson said, especially during the high-flow times. It is during these times, he said, that the bookstore would take on the highest liability since so many people would have their belongings outside, unattended.
Elder said she would like to see the Bookstore reinstate the policy to ensure things like this don’t happen in the future.
“I can’t even believe in my mind that nobody saw this guy, that many times, put a book in his backpack,” Elder said. “I think people are real complacent and they just don’t care sometimes.”
Putnam was booked and held at Cache County Jail until his initial appearance in court on Thursday afternoon. First district court clerk Toni Little said Putnam was granted a continuance; his next court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday, April 26, at 9 a.m. She said he was granted a public defender and then released on his own recognizance.
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu