The stabbing death of a shoplifter at a Midtown CVS has New Yorkers once again buzzing about how a dramatic rise in retail theft since the COVID pandemic should be addressed — and whether more violence in stores can be expected.
Charles Brito, the 50-year-old suspected shoplifter who was stabbed dead by a store clerk, had a history of petty theft before he walked into the CVS on Broadway and W. 49th St. early Thursday morning.
According to cops, Brito punched the clerk, Scotty Enoe, in the face after Enoe attempted to stop him from lifting merchandise.
After other employees broke up the fight, authorities document that Enoe walked to the back of the store before coming back, pulling a knife and stabbing Brito in the torso at least six times, a law enforcement source told the Daily News.
“I didn’t stab him over CVS products. I stabbed him over punching me. Look at my face,” Enoe told officers, according to the source.
Store owners, elected officials and law enforcement who spoke to The News nevertheless said they felt the bloody end to Brito’s life could have been avoided if more was done to prevent shoplifting from happening in the first place.
“It’s totally predictable that you’re going to have events like this when you cripple law enforcement,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer who now lectures at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Basically, you have the law of the street now. It falls on store clerks and subway passengers — they have to step in and fill the vacuum that should be filled by having a reliable, dependable, accessible law enforcement and security apparatus.”
O’Donnell contends that a failure to adequately prosecute low-level crimes like shoplifting has resulted in a climate where cops are less likely to arrest suspected thieves, and store clerks are less likely to expect cops to respond to calls.
Francisco Marte, the president of the Bodega and Small Business Group, offered a similar view.
Marte helped bail out Harlem bodega worker Jose Alba after he fatally stabbed a patron who attacked him behind the counter of a corner store, and he advocated for his charges to be dropped. He also threw his support behind Harlem fish market worker Junior Hernandez, who fatally stabbed a man and wounded his brother after they were thwarted from shoplifting shrimp.
“Every time something like this happens, you can see that the person has over 20 previous arrests. So what are they doing on the street? They’re supposed to be in jail,” he said. “We as a community have to hold accountable our elected officials, as well as our DAs. They are not doing their jobs. They are the ones that are creating the environment in which people think that they can commit crimes and get away with it.”
In particular, Marte faulted the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg.
Bragg came under fire as soon as he took office in January 2022 when he advised prosecutors to charge people accused of armed robbery in stores with petit larceny, provided they didn’t create a genuine risk of physical harm. After catching blowback for the move, Bragg clarified the policy, saying his office would seek felony charges for anyone waving a gun in a store — loaded or not.
Bragg’s office has launched several initiatives to combat retail theft in the nearly 18 months since the memo. He’s pointed to a decrease in theft in Manhattan since he took office, with shoplifting complaints down by 11% in May compared to the same period last year, robberies down by 5%, and petit larceny decreasing by 8%.
Citywide, petty larcenies — the majority of them connected to shoplifting — rose a staggering 44% from 2021 to 2022 and have remained largely flat this year, dropping just 2%, according to NYPD data. Police made over 22,000 retail theft arrests last year.
Shoplifting rates have steadily risen across the country since the pandemic. According to the National Retail Federation, retailers nationwide lost $94.5 billion in merchandise in 2021, a number that’s expected to rise to $115 billion by 2025. In New York, shoppers in many drug stores need to ask clerks to unlock containers shielding everyday items.
Councilman Bob Holden (D-Queens) wrote to CVS last month to demand that the chain pharmacy do more to address thefts in its stores within his district. On Friday he told the Daily News that the company has been responsive.
“The cops are overwhelmed,” he said. “If you listen to the scanner, each car is holding five 911 jobs. They’re going to put someone shoplifting from CVS way on the bottom of the list — they’re not going to get there on time. So we need to beef up security.”
Holden said that since reaching out, CVS hired three retired cops to work as security.
“They found out there was just a few of these guys who are repeat offenders,” he said. “They found they were also operating a big fence operation in Queens.”
When asked about Brito’s death, Holden said that “there is a thing called personal responsibility.”
“If you’re going to punch somebody, you’ve gotta be prepared for the consequences,” he said. “He’s been doing that quite a while apparently, and it’s an epidemic in New York City, and I think it does send a message — you have to be responsible for your actions. It’s not like he was an innocent bystander and happened to get stabbed.”
Mayor Adams has also made getting a handle on shoplifting a priority. In May, he and the city’s DAs unveiled a plan to tamp down on retail theft, with an eye toward addressing root causes like poverty and drug addiction while homing in on organized gangs of thieves.
But Holden suggested none of that will be enough if elected leaders continue to push legislation that he says undermines the NYPD. Specifically, he cited bills now under consideration in the City Council that would require cops to provide more data after enacting a police stop.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has backed some of those bills and defended them through his spokesman William Gerlich, who said Holden “is following a familiar pattern of attributing any public safety threat with public safety reforms.”
“In this case, it’s particularly egregious and ridiculous, given the bill in question has no correlation and would have no impact on this incident — to say nothing of the fact that it’s yet to be enacted,” Gerlich said.
A spokesman for CVS said that the company is “cooperating with police in their investigation” into Brito’s death, but wouldn’t comment further on the matter.
