The Colorado grocery store employee fired for filming a group of thieves making a sloppy escape with hundreds of dollars worth of laundry items said Thursday that he was simply following a “direct order” and is “devastated” by his termination.
Santino Burrola had followed three men into the parking lot of the King Soopers store last month and filmed them with his cellphone as they stuffed roughly $500 worth of stolen laundry products into a car and drove away.
The next day, he was suspended. A week later, he was told he was fired.
“I was given a direct order by the third person in charge to get the license plate, and my initial reaction was to record,” Burrola, a former military police officer, told Fox News.
“You know, better evidence, to get their faces, description of the vehicle and the license plate number.”
Burrola posted a video of the robbery on TikTok, which shows the three men struggling to get their loot from a full cart into the back of a black Chevy Trax.
“Really, bro, you got to resort to this? The economy isn’t that bad,” Burrola could be heard teasing the thieves in the viral video that has since been shared by the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Office.
“Better gettin’ while the gettin’s good,” Burrola quipped.
The getaway driver hops in the driver’s seat, but his accomplices are slow at unloading the stolen products.
When the other two finally close the liftgate and clumsily hop in the back, Burrola snatches off a tinfoil sheet that had been covering the rear license plate, revealing its numbers before the car speeds off.
Burrola then phoned the police and shared the video with them.
The following day, he was suspended from the store. He said he was “shocked and devastated” when he was fired the next week.
King Soopers is a subsidy of the Kroger Company, which has a policy against chasing thieves or intervening in thefts.
But Burrola never put his hands on the suspects — just filmed them from a short distance.
“We have security measures in place to help prevent crime and de-escalate such confrontations to minimize the risk to our associates,” Kroger told CBS Colorado in a statement. “While we are unable to comment on personnel matters, we value our hardworking associates and their safe return home.”
Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Detective Erik Vancleave, who appeared alongside Burrola on Fox News on Thursday, said that if it weren’t for the employee’s quick thinking to record the thieves, his agency would not have been able to get the driver in custody so quickly.
“We would have caught that at some point, but without Santino’s video that he gave us and me being able to do a little cleaner investigation, it would have been a lot harder to do,” he said.
“His video to us immensely helped this investigation. I was able, with other detectives … able to put the driver in custody, in jail within 24 hours,” Vancleave added.
With Burrola’s video, police contacted the registered owner of the vehicle, who had loaned the car to a friend, and the driver was found.
The driver, 32-year-old Jorge Pantoja, is in custody at the Adams County Detention Facility on unrelated felony charges, the sheriff’s office said. He was additionally charged with theft and shoplifting.
Pantoja told police he had picked up the other two men at a train station and offered them some money in exchange for stealing from the store. They have not yet been apprehended.
“We’re still working on the other two. We should have that wrapped up hopefully by the end of next week,” Vancleave said.
