Late night store Clerks, what is the strangest things that's happened on the job?

I work at a Liquor store in a not-so-nice area of town. I see lots of weird shit pretty much every day, but nothing has topped one evening this summer.

My coworker and I were in the middle of a busy rush when a lady comes in and asks us if we were aware that two kids were standing out on the corner of the store. I figured it was a couple of teenagers trying to get people to buy for them so I walk out to shoo them away.

Turns out these "kids" were actually like pre-school kids and they were bawling their eyes out. No parents in sight and too hysterical to say anything to us. The woman and I tried to comfort them and see if we could get them to talk but no dice. We thought they were abandoned, but no one saw any parents ditching them. With no idea what else to try, I call the cops thinking they might have some better luck.

One cop car shows up and at first, they don't have much luck either. One kid calms down enough to give them a first name and age of the two boys and points the cop in the general direction of where they live. But that's not really enough to go on, so the cops start asking the locals if they recognize them.

After about an hour of this, someone finally recognizes the two kids as his cousin's, but wonders where the third kid is. Knowing there's an AWOL third kid, four more cop cars show up and start scouring the neighborhood. Thankfully, being a 1 year old, the kid was still lying in his crib at home, but other than him, no one else was home. But now that the cops have an address, they find out who lives there. The dad was at work and freaked out when the officer mentioned that his kids had been left unattended for something like two and a half hours. When the mother finally shows up, her response to the situation isn't "Oh my God! What happened to my babies???", its "Now what???", as if having the cops called on her is a common occurrence.

Lots of cops hanging out in our lot generally isn't good for business, and by now, we've got four or five police cars and 10 or so officers camping out in our parking lot interrogating this woman. She claimed she went shopping for like 15 minutes, but that was a complete lie. Every officer that was talking to her was getting insanely fed up with how poorly she was handling the situation.

Unfortunately, we closed before we could see the resolution of the situation, but the next day there was an article in the newspaper about her arrest. It was a pretty depressing scene all around and even today I hope those three kids are doing way better. :(

Tl:dr-Unattended kids run away and get lost, end up at my store. Cops called and a negligent mother is arrested.

/r/AskReddit Thread