The World's Dumbest Fast Food Crimes

When you have a warrant out for your arrest because you're a murder suspect, your strategy should be to keep a low profile. However, that's not how Antoine Sims decided to play the game in 2022. Sims had previously been involved in a drug deal that went south with gunfire, and he was accused of setting a car on fire after a woman inside was hit with a stray bullet. One night when Sims was out of jail on bond and had a warrant for a missed court date, he decided to visit a Georgia McDonald's with his fiancée.

Sims got hot under the collar when he missed hearing an employee calling his order number and ended up with cold fries rather than hot ones. An employee offered him a refund. Nevertheless, Sims started yelling obscenities, demanded fresh fries, threw a drink, and called 911 over the incident. The owner also called 911 and asked Sims to leave. A policeman outside asked him to sign a statement agreeing not to return to the restaurant. Rather than signing, he fled on foot.

Police tased Sims once they caught him. A search of his fiancée's car revealed 31 grams of marijuana. So, he ended up with obstruction and drug charges to add to his rap sheet. Perhaps calling 911 for frivolous reasons isn't the way to go if you have a warrant out for your arrest.

If you're going to do dumb crimes, you shouldn't choose dumb hiding places or let your stomach make decisions for you. In 2015, Fredrick Warren walked into a Subway, threatened the cashier with a knife, and proceeded to pull cash out of the register before leaving. All the smells of baking bread and sub sandwich meats and fixings must have started up a fierce sub sandwich craving for Warren. He was smart enough to realize he couldn't return to Subway to get a sub sandwich after he robbed the place. Luckily, he knew of another sub sandwich shop he could visit nearby. After all, he now had money in his pocket to burn.

A surveillance video from Loyola University shows Warren crossing the street and walking about 120 feet to another sub sandwich shop called Potbelly. Oddly enough, the two sub shops are within view of each other. Warren promptly bought himself a sub, walked to the back of the shop, took off his coat, and started eating. And that's where police found him, along with the knife he'd used for the robbery and $186. We understand cravings, but not getting out of sight of the scene of the crime to satisfy them isn't the brightest thing you can do as a criminal.

Leaving a trail of food behind is apparently not a one-off mistake for fast-food burglars. When three guys burgled a Build-a-Burger in Mt. Morris, New York, in 2015, it was the macaroni salad that led to their arrest. Timothy S. Walker, Jr., Matthew P. Sapetko, and James P. Marullo broke into the restaurant and grabbed the cash register and a 10-pound bowl of macaroni. They thought they were being smart by grabbing the surveillance system, too, but their sloppy eating habits led to their demise.

Once the thieves left the hamburger shop, they traveled along a biking and hiking path called The Greenway Trail to make their getaway. Along the dark path, they seemed to keep losing things, like parts of the surveillance system and cash register. There had only been $29 in the cash register in the first place, but the thieves lost part of it as change fell out of the cash register and onto the trail. However, the trail of macaroni salad they'd all been eating on their journey down the trail led the police straight to the thieves, who received multiple charges related to the break-in. Walker also received drug-related charges, while Marullo had previous felony convictions and, thus, got no bail options. We're going to need the recipe for a macaroni salad good enough to steal by the 10-pound bowl. It was certainly the best thing they got from their night's adventures.

Setting up a meth lab is dangerous enough without putting co-workers and customers at risk from setting it up inside a Taco Bell. In 2015, Taco Bell employees Christopher Adam Mathous and Kent Jerome Duby set up a meth lab at work so they could keep their high without needing to come down from it during working hours. The Cedar Rapids, Iowa, police didn't find it until they were called to the restaurant about a suspicious person outside the restaurant before dawn one morning.

Mathous was the suspicious person hanging around outside during the early morning hours, and he had a peeled lithium battery (a meth ingredient) with him. The police investigated the restaurant and found some of Mathous' and Duby's other meth lab ingredients in a utility area: lye, drain cleaner, and a butane and propane camping fuel mix.

The Taco-Bell-turned-meth-lab closed down to ensure that professionals could fully decontaminate the building. And the two men who had put their own and the public's health at risk went to jail on drug-related charges. Nobody wants to worry about a Taco Bell exploding from a chemistry experiment gone wrong.

For some, McNuggets are simply the vehicle for getting dipping sauce into your mouth. At the very least, they don't taste the same without your favorite sauce. So, when Robert Golwitzer, Jr. ordered McNuggets from an Ankeny, Iowa, McDonald's in 2021, he was sure to ask for his favorite dipping sauce. Being supper time, he was ready for sauce-laden nuggets to satisfy his hunger. Unfortunately, when he left the restaurant and started rifling through his bag of food, there was no sauce to be found. Since he had no other sauce available that would do, his anger began to bubble.

Finding the phone number for McDonald's, Golwitzer called to complain, but his anger got the best of him, and his threats escalated. At first, he merely expressed his desire to return to beat up the employee on the other end of the line. But then he started making bomb threats.

Not taking his threats lightly, the employees called the police and gave them Golwitzer's phone number. When the police called him back, Golwitzer had no problem admitting that he had indeed made a bomb threat. He made the same admission to the police in a later interview. The customer's angry tirade over a bit of missing sauce landed him a felony charge. A bomb threat over missing sauce seems extreme, but never underestimate how angry someone can get over not getting their way with food.

A few months after Stephaun Gallaread left his job at a Lawrenceville, Georgia, Taco Bell, he decided to return just after midnight in the early hours of Christmas in 2019. He was dressed in black from head to toe to blend in with the night and wearing headphones for entertainment. Gallaread easily let himself through the drive-through window. Once inside, he returned to work like it was old times, customizing a Taco Bell feast himself. Once he'd fed himself, he lay on his side on the hard kitchen floor and napped. Awakening nearly three hours later, he grabbed a laptop and tablet as Christmas gifts to himself and skedaddled.

Video footage captured his whole solitary adventure, which led to positive ID for the Christmas feast sleepover bandit. The night's events led to a burglary charge for Gallaread. Perhaps returning to rob a place where people would recognize your face on video wasn't the brightest idea.

Most of us have watched enough movies to know a thing or two about how getaway cars are supposed to work, but Jeremy Lovitt and Gabriel Gonzales must have misunderstood. In 2013, the two young men decided to rob a Burger King in Sacramento, California. They went through the normal motions of demanding money from the cash register at gunpoint, so that part of the robbery worked out well for them. However, they forgot to leave a driver in their running getaway car in the parking lot. Oops.

While Lovitt and Gonzales were busy demanding money inside, one of the employees slipped outside unnoticed and sneakily drove the thieves' still-running car around the corner from the restaurant to hide it. After a short "Dude, where's my car?" moment, the foolish thieves made a run for it across a nearby field of tall grass. With a slower start to their getaway than planned, the police had no trouble catching up and taking them to jail.

People are always escaping through ventilation shafts in the movies, and they make it look fairly easy. Unfortunately, the reality was very different for a burglar who tried using Arby's ventilation system as part of his robbery. The plan seemed simple enough. Laquain Deshawn Guy climbed onto the roof of a Mullins, South Carolina, Arby's one night after the restaurant had closed in 2014. He had the brilliant idea to use the roof to access the restaurant's ventilation shafts. That way, he could bypass needing to pick locks or worry about alarm systems. But, alas, his plan came to an abrupt halt once he got stuck. It turned out that the air passageways weren't made for a grown person to crawl through after all.

The Mullins Arby's doesn't open up for business until 10:00 a.m., so he had to wait 10 hours for employees to come in the next morning to start prepping for the day. Luckily, it wasn't summer, but he still ended up dehydrated and with a broken arm. Desperate, in pain, and with no other option, Guy yelled for the employees to help him after they arrived.

So, instead of leaving the restaurant with a nice amount of loot, he ended up traveling from the hospital to jail on burglary charges. Sometimes, things just don't work out with your Mission-Impossible-level plans without having full knowledge of what you're jumping into — literally.

If there's anything criminals should learn in Thievery 101, it's that they shouldn't go back to the scene of the crime. So, it's a good idea to avoid stealing from a fast food restaurant where you like to eat. Another lesson that criminals should take to heart is to avoid cops. But we've noticed that many dumb fast-food thieves tend to have slept through that lesson, too.

Back in 2011, Shawn Dustin Page tried to rob a Jack in the Box restaurant in San Diego, California. When the cashier told him they didn't have the key to the cash register, he left. And not being the brightest of thieves, he returned to the Jack in the Box dining room the next day to order food. Having apparently not disguised himself either time, an employee pointed him out to the cops who were at the restaurant investigating another incident. Neither visits to Jack in the Box were fruitful for Page that week since he left empty-handed in the back of a police car headed straight for jail.

The Jack in the Box incident may not have been the first time Page had returned to the crime scene within a few days in recent days. He also looked like the thief who had robbed the same Wells Fargo Bank twice in a week only a few days earlier, which brought the FBI into the picture.