Daily Stormer
November 21, 2015
It be hard out der for a nigga. If he gotta rob da cripple lady, he gots ta do it.
Veronica Erwin has a prosthetic leg and foot, but she still walks uncountable steps every day at Rock Hill’s Kwik Klean laundry. Eight hours a day, she pushes a broom and washes and folds other people’s clothes.
She is by no means wealthy, but she sees people at the Albright Road laundry on the city’s southern edge who are worse off financially than she. Her hand goes into her pocket and always comes out with something for somebody who might need a decent meal.
For years, Erwin, 52, also has stood at every Winthrop University home basketball game, cheering and waving. Sometimes she makes a sign and waves that. When one arm gets tired, she uses the other. She cheers until her throat hurts.
On Tuesday, somebody took advantage of the woman who works and cheers on one leg.
A man walked into the laundry and spoke with Erwin. He made nice. She spoke to him as kindly as she speaks to everyone who comes into her world.
But this man waited for Erwin to empty the trash, and as her back was turned at the other end of the building, the man crawled long the floor, slithering like a snake, and stole the day’s receipts for which Erwin had worked so hard.
“At first he talked to me,” Erwin said. “I told him how I wanted to sell my car. He even went out and looked under the hood.
“But then, the same man, he stole. I feel scared and violated.”
The thief asked Erwin to change a $20 bill, even asked her for toilet tissue so he could use the restroom.
“I was nice to him,” she said. “Then he stole from us.”
The thief, who did no laundry, slipped out of the store with the money. Erwin discovered the larceny later, when she went to count the day’s take – and there was nothing.
“I panicked,” she said.
She found the empty money bag stashed in the restroom trash can.
This was not a robbery. No force was used. No weapon was shown. Nobody was hurt.
But maybe worse, the crime hurt Veronica Erwin’s heart.
“I love the people here,” said Erwin, who moved to Rock Hill from Long Island, N.Y., more than a decade ago, embracing her new home with a bear hug.
Customers at the laundry Wednesday spoke so highly of Erwin and her kindness, and then used words that cannot be printed in a newspaper to describe the thief.
Rock Hill police officers and crime scene investigators came to the laundry Tuesday afternoon and spent more than an hour with Erwin. They made a copy of surveillance video that clearly shows the man crawling on the floor and grabbing the money.
Detectives are working the case, said Capt. Mark Bollinger, spokesman for the Rock Hill Police Department.