Nicol Helland remembers getting a little nervous when the teenagers walked into her Southcenter Mall clothing store one afternoon, scooped up armfuls of clothes and piled them next to the cash register.
"From my experience, that usually means a stolen credit card," said Helland, manager of Mr. Rags. "When they dropped $2,000 in cash, I asked them, 'Did you just get a settlement? Are you famous?' They said they had rich parents."
Police say the money was part of $135,000 in cash stolen from a Bellevue family last month. And the visit to Mr. Rags was just one stop in a two-week spending blitz by at least nine young people who dropped nearly half of the wad on clothing, video games, jewelry, compact discs and limousine rides.
