When two boys made off with a meal from The Lowry Cafe in north Minneapolis without paying, owner Taya Kaufenberg reached out to the community.
Kaufenberg put up a Facebook post — now deleted — asking if any of her restaurant's more than 2,000 followers knew the boys' identity so she could ask them to pay for their food.
Her post initially drew ire for using very clear surveillance images of the two boys, one of whom she said is a middle schooler. The other was older.
But it worked. Two days after the Monday posting, the older boy came in and paid for the entrée the two had stolen from the restaurant's to-go service.
"I knew if I posted, someone would know them," Kaufenberg said.
Accusations of racism and condemnations for public shaming of children were raised on social media, but Kaufenberg said it was better to teach the young people a lesson about stealing than to get them a criminal record by calling police.
"People offered to pay for the food, but for me it wasn't about the money so much as it was about the lesson and the community coming together," she said. She declined to disclose what they ordered or how much it cost.
Now, Kaufenberg said she is hoping to reach out more to the community and start conversations about how to solve larger problems like hunger, which she said might have led to the theft.
