WRONGLY ACCUSED: How Walmart's Shoplifting Charge Derailed A Northport Woman's Life

NORTHPORT, AL — Northport resident Misty Hill is described as an unassuming 48-year-old woman who keeps to herself and respects the rule of law.

So much so, in fact, that she still renews her concealed carry pistol permit each year, even though the state of Alabama dropped the requirement in January 2023.

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The last instance where she did so, however, threw her life into chaos.

Indeed, Hill visited the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office in September 2023 to once again renew her pistol permit and was in "shock and disbelief" to learn that there was an outstanding warrant with the Tuscaloosa Police Department for her arrest on a charge of fourth-degree theft of property from the Walmart Supercenter on Skyland Boulevard.

While Hill avoided a stay in the Tuscaloosa County Jail, she was arrested and left with no choice but to pay the $300 bond on the misdemeanor charge.

Hill recalled the situation as "humiliating" and said she was forced to acknowledge and repeat that she was being arrested for shoplifting. She was booked, searched and held until her husband could coordinate with a bondsman.

The only problem? She wasn't guilty and ultimately saw the charge dismissed in municipal court — but not before having to navigate the legal system and numerous court appearances to argue her innocence.

"This is everybody's worst nightmare," Tuscaloosa attorney J.R. Krebs told Patch in an interview on Friday. "You do this lawful activity and you end up getting arrested for something you didn't do."

Misty Hill vs. Walmart Stores Inc.

Several months before Hill was charged with shoplifting — Jan. 20, 2023, to be specific — an asset protection manager at the Walmart on Skyland Boulevard in Tuscaloosa noticed a woman on the store's security camera putting some items under a shirt she had picked up while perusing the shelves.

Sitting in a little security room in the Tuscaloosa store, the employee watched as the woman went to the self-checkout and scanned some items but not those she had concealed.

The employee immediately confronted the alleged shoplifter before interviewing the woman with an off-duty Tuscaloosa Police officer and recovering the stolen property.

The dollar amount of the items she was accused of stealing came out to $44.02 before tax, according to court records obtained by Patch.

Tuscaloosa attorney J.R. Krebs, who is representing Hill in a civil lawsuit filed in October against Walmart Stores Inc., told Patch that the accused thief was asked to provide her name and offered up the name "Misty Hill."

Krebs insists the employee and off-duty officer did not ask for any formal identification and allowed her to leave the store without any kind of verification other than her word.

In the official written narrative offered by the off-duty TPD officer, the officer claims the accused shoplifter was asked if she knew why she was in the little security office, to which the woman said "yes" and asked, "am I going to jail?"

The off-duty officer then reportedly read Hill her Miranda rights at 8:58 p.m. the night of the incident and said the store planned to obtain a theft warrant at a later date.

Several months later, in May, Walmart eventually signed off on a warrant for Misty Hill's arrest.

"[Hill] wasn't at that Walmart that day and told us that if she does go to Walmart, she doesn't go to that one [on Skyland Boulevard] and said she hadn't been to that Walmart in over a year," Krebs said. "But they served the warrant, they arrested her, booked her and she bonded out.

Indeed, when Hill's case made its way to Tuscaloosa Municipal Court, the wheels of justice were expectedly slow to turn and she saw her case continued three times before it was eventually dismissed in May — a full year after the arrest warrant was sworn by Walmart.

"She had to show up to court and the case would be continued, then it would be continued again," Krebs explained, underscoring the undue mental and financial hardships it placed on his client. "The whole time, what we haven't figured out yet is this lady says she wasn't in the Walmart and you've got a picture of what the shoplifter looks like. Why didn't a Walmart representative show up to court and say 'Hey, this isn't the same woman'?

"Somebody has missed here, just swung and missed," Krebs, a former college baseball player at Shelton State, added. "Why did it take this long for this lady who was showing up to court three or four times and why wasn't the case dismissed before this? Not only did [Walmart] miss but they kept it going."

'A pattern of behavior'

As the misdemeanor criminal case against Hill moved forward in Tuscaloosa Municipal Court, legal documents obtained by Patch show that her criminal defense attorney subpoenaed Walmart’s surveillance footage before successfully arguing that Hill was nowhere to be found in the video.

Still, Hill's legal counsel argued at the time that despite having possession of the video for several months after charges were filed, Walmart refused to dismiss the criminal charges against Hill and did not send a single representative to any of Hill's court dates before the charge was dismissed with prejudice earlier this year.

Hill — cleared of stealing $44.02 of products — then hired Krebs Law and set out to hold accountable a transnational mega-retailer with an estimated enterprise value of nearly $818 billion.

"We have pictures of her and the alleged shoplifter and it is a night and day difference," Krebs pointed out. "They don't even look alike."

Here's a side-by-side comparison of Hill (left) and the shoplifting suspect when she was interviewed at the Walmart on Skyland Boulevard:

The complaint filed by Krebs on behalf of Hill in October also alleges that Walmart used the judicial process to pursue criminal charges against Hill "merely to satisfy a quota."

"Walmart's done this several times," Krebs told Patch. "It's a pattern of behavior and what I'm wondering is if there are any incentives for the asset protection folks to make arrests or meet a certain quota? What kind of training are these associates getting? How are they trained? Whose training these folks to spot shoplifters or swear out a warrant and all this other stuff?"

Indeed, Walmart has grabbed recent headlines — just in Alabama — for similar instances of individuals being falsely accused of shoplifting. These wrongfully accused tell stories similar to Hill of being humiliated, dragged through the legal system and harassed by a multibillion-dollar company with limitless resources.

In one high-profile example, Mobile native Crystal Thompson told media outlets in 2016 that she was at home watching the Rose Bowl Parade when a sheriff's deputy knocked on her door to serve an arrest warrant for shoplifting at a nearby Walmart.

Like Hill, Thompson was terrified as she was transported to a local jail, searched and even required to remove her dentures, according to a 2018 interview with The Business Times.

After she was released from custody, Walmart then began sending letters to Thompson demanding she pay $200 or face a lawsuit — ultimately receiving three letters over the course of two months before a Walmart employee acknowledged under oath in a deposition that he mistakenly accused her of shoplifting in December 2015.

The Business Times reported that the employee testified that it had appeared that one of Thompson's daughters failed to scan about $70 worth of groceries at the self-checkout line.

This prompted the employee to follow the daughter out to the parking lot and write down the license plate of the vehicle, which was registered to Thompson.

Around the same time and place as Thompson's case — the Mobile area in 2016 — Lesleigh Nurse was at the self-checkout at the Semmes Walmart with her family and had issues with a faulty scanner.

CBS 42 News reported in November 2021 that Nurse had even sought help from a Walmart store associate, only to be stopped by an asset protection manager after she had finished and paid.

“I remember going in that little room and thinking this will be resolved, this is an accident, this isn’t on purpose,” Nurse told the Birmingham television station.

Nurse was subsequently charged with stealing $48 worth of groceries, including Christmas lights, a loaf of bread and a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal.

In a similar outcome to the two aforementioned cases in Alabama, the criminal charge was dropped when no one from Walmart appeared in court to argue in support of the accusations leveled by their employees.

One of the noteworthy moments during Nurse's case, though, came when University of Nebraska law professor Ryan Sullivan testified that Walmart cleverly uses civil recovery laws to fleece money out of individuals they have accused of shoplifting in their stores.

Indeed, Sullivan alleged that in a two-year period, Walmart charged approximately 1.4 million people with theft of property and went on to collect more than $300 million through civil demand letters similar to those received by Nurse and Thompson.

Separately, Walmart reported $648 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ended on Jan. 31 — marking a 6.03% increase from the prior fiscal year.

Despite the negative impact to Nurse's reputation as a result of the criminal charge, the jury sided with her in a civil lawsuit against the company that saw the court order Walmart to pay Nurse $2.1 million in punitive damages.

“At first you think ‘Well, I’ll pay it and it will all go away,'” Nurse told CBS 42 News in 2021. “But then, I’m like I didn’t do anything wrong. Why would I pay for something I didn’t do?”

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