Burnsville Man Charged with Stealing from Convenience Store

A Burnsville man has been charged with stealing more than $1,500 from the convenience store in which he worked, mainly by processing fraudulent returns of cigarettes.

Lonnie Eugene St. John, 19, is charged with felony theft, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

St. John is scheduled to make a first appearance on the charge Oct. 31 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.

According to the criminal complaint, police were called to an unnamed Burnsville convenience store on June 8 on a report of employee theft. The manager told them that when she had arrived at work that morning, accounts from the previous night’s cash register totals showed a “significant” loss of money.

Surveillance video showed that St. John had made a fraudulent return of cartons of cigarettes totaling $816, and pocketed the cash from the register, the complaint says.

The manager said she had done further investigation and found other significant losses of money on other days when St. John was operating the register. She also verified that St. John had been responsible for those losses by reviewing surveillance video from those dates.

The manager told police that she and the company’s loss prevention officer had determined that St. John stole about $1,658 from the store.

When St. John arrived for his shift, the loss prevention officer met with him, and St. John admitted that he had been stealing from the company since January, and provided a written and signed confession, according to the complaint.

St. John returned $640 in cash to the loss prevention officer.

Police arrested St. John, who admitted that he began stealing individual packs of cigarettes in January and “an occasional dollar or two” from the register. He said that he recently had been having financial difficulties, so he started to process fraudulent returns of cigarettes and other merchandise and pocketing the money from the register.