- November 17, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
The deputy thought the supposed victim’s story sounded off.
Magdaline Scott, a 38-year-old Palm Coast resident, called the Sheriff’s Office at about 11:45 a.m. April 23 to report a robbery.
When Deputy George Hristakopoulos arrived at her house, she told him in a sworn statement recorded on his Axon body camera that she had gone to Walmart at about 10:30 p.m. the previous night and was approaching the store’s west entrance when two black men in their 20s or 30s grabbed her backpack.
She described the supposed thieves in detail: One, she told Hristakopoulos, was five feet, 11 inches tall and 150-160 pounds, wearing black shoes, black shorts, a hat and a white shirt; the other, she told him, was six feet tall, 180-190 pounds, had dreadlocks and was wearing a black pants, red shoes and a red shirt.
Scott “stated that one of the males forcefully snatched her bookbag off of her back” and that when she started to go after the men, “…the male with the dreads advised her, ‘If I were you I wouldn’t try it,’” Hristakopoulos wrote in a charging affidavit.
Scott told Hristakopoulos that the stolen backpack was pink and black and contained a variety of pills from recently filled prescriptions, as well as her keys, ID card, credit cards, a game and a knife.The deputy asked her why she hadn’t reported the crime earlier, and she told him she’d been scared.
Then he asked her if he’d see the alleged robbery on Walmart’s surveillance footage.
“Ms. Scott appeared startled at my question, and began shrugging her shoulders,” and said she didn’t know if it would have been caught on camera, Hristakopoulos wrote in the affidavit.
When Hristakopoulos told her “that practically every square foot of the Walmart parking lot is covered by surveillance cameras,” she began “showing several signs of deception, such as looking down when answering, becoming increasingly fidgety, and responding with ‘huh’ to my clearly worded questions,” Hristakopoulos wrote.
Then Scott fessed up: She’d made up the whole story. She told Hristakopoulos that her mother told her to fabricate the tale about the two black men.
But when Hristakopoulos questioned her further, it turned out that wasn’t true, either: She told him “that her mother did not know anything about her fabricating the story,” he wrote in the affidavit.
She then “stated that she lost her backpack, possibly in Port Orange,” Hristakopoulos wrote. That statement would turn out to be untrue, too.
Hristakopoulos read Scott her rights, and “she began pleading with me not to arrest her,” he wrote. He asked her “why she would make up such a story, implicating two males who did not exist.” Her reply is redacted in the charging affidavit.
But when Hristakopoulos asked her to, she retrieved “the pink and black backpack, which contained a large quantity of prescription pills,” from inside the house. The pills all appeared to have been prescribed to her, Hristakopoulos wrote in the affidavit.
Hristakopoulos arrested Scott on a charge of filing a false report of a crime. She remained at the Flagler County jail as of the morning of Friday, April 24, on $500 bond.
