A career criminal by the name of Odis Gillard has been making the rounds over the last year to virtually every food establishment in the Lower Haight with a tip jar on the counter. As you can read in a lengthy account from Haighteration, the six-foot-two-inch African-American man in his sixties is now well known to every business in the area, and he’s been pretty ridiculously persistent and egregious in returning certain places, day after day, attempting to grab money out of the tip jar even after he’s been caught and shooed away — including one instance at Greenburger’s where, after employees had removed the tip jar from the counter, he tried to make off with the donation can for the Haight-Ashbury Food Bank instead.
In another instance last year at Three Twins Ice Cream, a female employee begged Gillard to give her back her tips after she’d seen him steal them, and he did.
One employee at Café du Soleil is now pursuing a stay-away order against Gillard, hoping she can get more businesses in the neighborhood to sign on so that Gillard is forced to stay away from the entire neighborhood, or face arrest. “It is getting to my head that people keep telling me it is not a big deal,” says the woman, who claims she was physically assaulted by Gillard the last time she tried to stop him from stealing tips. “If you stop people at small offenses they won’t do bigger offenses. People aren’t taking it seriously, neither are the cops and I want people’s attitudes or minds to shift.”
Captain Ann Mannix of the SFPD says that Gillard’s record goes back to the early 90s in S.F., with 79 felony arrests and 78 misdemeanor arrests, and that he’s court-ordered to stay away from multiple locations around the city.
If you have a second, read the comical blow-by-blow of incidents over the last year, and every single time the dude swears he isn’t there to steal. Hilarious.
Serial Shoplifter Continues to Plague the Neighborhood [Haighteration]
