I’m sorry, but this bullshit prosecution for a fucking $20 bag seems like a bizarre hate escapade by the Salvation Army store Manager against Sophia Nash.
That this is wasting Court time is an atrocity of our Justice system.
Someone at the bloody Salvation Army needs a good hard kick in the arse for going ahead with this pointless, wasteful prosecution for a bloody $20 bag, but when you actually start incredualeosyly reading the so called ‘evidence’ of this case, it becomes clear that this has been a set up of Nash…
Sophia Nash usually worked on the shop floor of the Mt Eden second-hand store but on the morning she was labelled a thief, she was told to work downstairs.
So the ex-model went into the belly of the Salvation Army store to tag clothes and took her own black Chanel handbag with her. Nash, 28, said she didn’t trust the staff cubby holes with the clientele of an op shop.
But store manager Helen Ravlich couldn’t be sure exactly what bag the ex-model had with her because she didn’t always bring the same one to work.
“It’s just a handbag,” Ravlich told the court.
“Not everyone would agree with that,” Judge Nicola Mathers replied.
But one handbag Ravlich had noticed was one yet to be put out on the floor because its bright material leant itself to be more of a winter item.
“It stood out because of its colour. It was bright yellow with hot pink sides – it was a fake Christian Dior, but something like that is something you notice.”
Ravlich believed the bag had been out the back for about a week but suddenly that Wednesday morning she’d noticed it was missing – right after Nash had taken a trolley of clothes up to the shop floor.
It couldn’t have been sold because Ravlich hadn’t priced it, shoppers couldn’t have grabbed it because there was a hot pink chain and “staff only” sign blocking the back room and a staff member couldn’t have bought it because they weren’t allowed.
“There’s even a sign on the wall telling them not to ask because they won’t be permitted,” Ravlich said.
But how could she have noticed it was missing immediately, asked Nash’s lawyer Karl Trotter.
“To be honest, I thought it was ugly.”
Suspicious, the store manager conducted her own “individual investigation” and spotted Nash across the road in her car.
Ravlich, wanting to be sure, waited until she’d returned to the shop and “was deployed” downstairs to give her time to go look in her car.
And there it was, she said, jammed in a back footwell wrapped in what appeared to be a white towel.
“I could see it was in her car and I just felt sick,” the manager told the court.
Devastated by the discovery, Ravlich raced back and quickly checked the shop’s CCTV footage.
Before she called the police, the manager thought she’d “better get it right”.
“To see exactly how it transpired.”
But the existence of CCTV footage was a surprise revelation – neither the prosecution nor the defence were aware there were security cameras.
Yet Ravlich maintained she’d told the cops all along that it existed. She’d even downloaded it and sent it to the Avondale police station.
The officer in charge, Constable Damian Harris, said police had received the CCTV footage, but the USB stick was corrupt. He’d even tried on his home computer.
“I went back a little while after, a month up to two, to see if I could get the footage again but they only hold it for two or three weeks after.”
But why wasn’t it disclosed, asked Trotter, because as defence counsel he had access to experts who might have been able to salvage it.
The lawyer argued successfully what Ravlich claimed to have seen on the footage shouldn’t be admissible evidence and tried to have the case thrown out because of the “prosecutorial misconduct”.
Judge Mathers ruled the CCTV evidence should be ignored but said there was still a case to answer.
The second surprise came when Ravlich, matter-of-factly, told the court she’d brought the infamous bag with her. Trotter said he’d been told by police the bag “didn’t exist”.
And the third shock piece of evidence was a photo of Nash’s black bag and its contents which shop assistant Rina Capila had taken on her phone.
After Ravlich supposedly spotted the pink and yellow bag, she mouthed “bag” to Capila and mimed holding one. The assistant took that to mean “take a photo” which was time-stamped 12.43pm.
With this revelation, everyone went to crowd around Capila’s iPhone 5 before someone suggested sending it to the registrar who could display it on a computer screen.
The court sat in silence as the photo transmitted.
Once the email tone dinged, all the players – excluding Judge Mathers – gathered around the computer before the court adjourned to get it printed.
The photograph clearly showed Nash’s Gucci car key chain sitting on the top of the bag because she’d just used them to move the car, Nash said.
Nash said as she was taking the tagged clothes upstairs to be hung, she’d looked out the door and saw the Range Rover – which she was still paying off – was parked in a 60 minute zone.
“I went, ‘Ugh’ and thought, ‘Okay that’s not good’.”
So she threw her white jumper over her shoulder along with her black bag and went to move the car across the road.
Nash, supported by ex-husband Thane Kirby, told the court she left the white jumper in the car because it was hot, but couldn’t remember exactly where she’d thrown it, then left her black handbag next to Capila.
…this is our money being spent on a pointless trial and it doesn’t even look like Nash had stolen the bag?
Someone at the Salvation Army needs to be Court-martialled for this. It is petty beyond belief and beneath the good works they do. This Helen Ravlich has some answering to do.
Oh dear, life in Auckland is just so hard eh?
Dont even try and deny it grannies, you been gossiping
I think there’s more to this story than at first appears, but yes, they probably should have just told her not to come back.
Cosmic, that would probably make more sense.
+1 COSMICRAY.
It seems obvious if you think a volunteer is stealing you just ask them to leave rather than a court case over $20?
And it is not even clear she was stealing!!
Stupid case, makes Sally’s look bad.
Ravlich should be fired.
Where the hell is Christianity now???????
This sends me a sad message as Salvation Army is mostly donated items and low or free staffed so Salvation Army should repent and apologise to Sophie and NZ for this trivia.
I know nothing about this case, but I was told first hand by a supervisor in another Christian charity shop that volunteers helping themselves to the best donated items is quite common.
Cleangreen says “Where the hell is Christianity now???????
This sends me a sad message as Salvation Army is mostly donated items and low or free staffed so Salvation Army should repent and apologise to Sophie and NZ for this trivia.”
The Sally Army makes a huge amount of money from donated goods; I should know because I donate and I buy from them. I always thought that whatever the circumstances behind this, if someone takes something they needed it more than me. If they didn’t take it and they have donated volunteer time what the hell is the issue.
I share donations between Sally Army, IHC, SPCA, School gala days, St Johns. The moment money becomes more important than people or animals I stop donating to that place.
Sallies would have lost credibility and donations as a consequence of this petty act, that would dwarf the alleged $20 hiest.
If that is what they do to volunteers / helpers, customers beware.
Petty, Petty, Petty, tight-sphinctered supervisor with no Christianity in sight. I’d rather give my stuff to someone sitting on the street than this uncharitable lot. And they try to drag you into their homophobic religion as if they had consciences! Phooey!
The Salvation Army does some excellent work highlighting poverty in NZ. But they are very challenging people to actually deal with.
My ‘local’ throws out a good percentage of the books donated. Unfortunately that means everything ‘old’. So Danielle Steels they keep. Something possibly worth $1000’s…or even $20, well that’s straight to the bin.
The kicker is, they INSIST on doing this. We’re a second hand dealer, they could make good money of us (and yes, we would make even better money) but NO, they would rather throw the books out, make nothing, and in fact end up paying for disposal. We couldn’t even tempt them by offering to help them single out the better books that they could sell for more than 50 cents. Yet they take the donation, rather than directing the books somewhere else.
and then, more importantly, there’s this
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/05/02/uk-salvation-army-chief-defends-ban-on-gay-members/
So for this reason, and a bunch of other issues, the thought of having the Salvation Army as a big landlord of social housing…yeah…no thanks.
One of the consequences of insecure housing and over-crowding is that people often find themselves having to get rid of stuff. So we donate it to op-shops, assuming that this is a good way to keep it out of landfill, and redistribute it to other low-income people who might need or value it. Sadly, because they have to process so much stuff, and have limited storage space (and limited knowledge of what is valuable to who), a lot of stuff ends up in the landfill anyway.
I’ve thought a lot about how it would be valuable to have council-funded waste consultants who can build up detailed databases of who can rehome what kinds of things most effectively in a specific locality or region. That way, people could consult these databases when getting rid of houseloads of stuff, rather than just dumping it all on op shops who don’t have the resources to deal with it all effectively.
More ambitious would be a bylaw that allows disused warehouses to be used gratis for temporary storage and sorting of re-usable stuff. Or a levy on any commercial product being imported into a region, collected by the regional councils, and used to fund recycling and re-use projects (a lot of which have been defunded under the NatACTs).
An interesting link Siobhan.
Of course I’m old enough to remember the Sallies’ tough stance against Fran Wilde’s homosexual law reform.
That’s when I realised the true nature of conservative Christianity.
I’ve had nothing to do with them ever since…
Obviously you every single detail of the case which of course we don’t but one fact that is beyond a shadow of a doubt is of course that it is not the Salvation Army who have brought this in front of the Courts but the Police. Now they may not know as much as you either but if there is blame to be laid here then it should probably be at their door
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