A video of someone who pepper-sprayed a Gig Harbor store employee during a robbery earlier this year went viral Thursday after someone posted an altered version of the footage online.
Two men allegedly stole several bottles of alcohol on March 30 from a Gig Harbor business and one pepper-sprayed an employee who was recording them with a cellphone, The News Tribune reported. The two suspects then left with a female driver who was allegedly waiting for them in a car in front of the store.
The Gig Harbor Police Department posted the the video of that incident on April 21 and wrote on social media that they had arrested one 19-year-old suspect and were looking for a second. An altered video of the pepper spray incident resurfaced on a Reddit post in the r/Unexpected subreddit Thursday. The post had 10,000 upvotes and more than 400 comments as of Thursday evening on r/Unexpected. The popular subreddit is meant “for unexpected twists in videos and gifs,” the website says.
Moderators removed the video from Reddit later that night.
“Your submission has been removed because it’s not unexpected,” moderators wrote. “Submissions to r/unexpected are supposed to have an unexpected twist in itself. While the situation was probably rather unexpected for you, there is no visible twist for the viewer.”
In the altered video, a voice dubbed over the footage says: “I’d probably put that down if I was you,” before a person walking by pepper-sprays in the direction of the camera. Then there’s the sound of coughing. The voiceover and coughing sounds are not in the original video posted on the Gig Harbor Police Department’s Facebook page on April 21. A reaction from someone asking the employee if she is OK is also missing from the altered video.
Addressing the video that appeared on Reddit, Gig Harbor Detective Sergeant Jarab Daniel told The News Tribune in a statement Thursday that the video police posted on Facebook “is an accurate representation of the video we have in evidence.”
“We are not able to provide comment on whether or not videos posted by others on the internet have been altered,” he wrote.
Asked about the status of the case, Daniel told The News Tribune that the police department cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.
The 19-year-old police arrested in connection to the robbery pleaded guilty earlier this year and is serving a prison sentence of a year and eight months, according to the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and Superior Court records.
Adam Faber, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, wrote in an email that the 19-year-old suspect pleaded guilty to robbery and assault on July 17.
Court records give this account of the robbery:
Police identified the 19-year-old suspect after tracking him down from a vehicle license plate reported by a witness. That vehicle was registered to a woman who told police that her son had taken the car. An officer later located the 19-year-old in Tacoma and took him into custody without incident. Police booked him into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of robbery.
The suspect “stated that he had sold the alcohol from the robbery for money,” the police report said. “While walking into the jail he asked if the victim of the robbery was going to be ok.”
The News Tribune reported that the store employee “was in pain due to the pepper-spray exposure” but told police she didn’t require medical aid, according to court records. She alleged the suspect who sprayed her took about six bottles of whiskey without paying.