LOIS HENRY: Strange encounter ends in arrest
| Friday, Nov 20 2009 07:17 PM
Last Updated Friday, Nov 20 2009 07:17 PM
I received a lot of reaction to my piece about the fellow who came to my door the other night, acted strangely and then ran off (see Wednesday's paper or my blog at www.bakersfield.com).
Well, he was arrested Thursday evening, still in northwest Bakersfield and still acting strangely.
He didn't do anything terribly bad and wasn't a dangerous guy. But I feel I need to clear up what happened and point out some interesting things I learned along the way.
First, the guy at my door and the people he works with are not connected to a string of "sales calls" followed by home burglaries in south and southwest bakersfield in October.
Bakersfield police Lt. Jay Borton told me they're convinced they caught those bad guys who, as we reported in Friday's paper, were members of a gang.
Second, you need a peddler's permit in the city or county to go door-to-door (Girl Scouts and other non- profits are exempt). And the permit only allows people to sell from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the city and 9 a.m. until 30 minutes after sunset in the county.
Third, the man who came to my door Tuesday night, along with a number of other young men and women that people have noticed around the city, work for a company called All Can Succeed.
The company, headquartered in Omaha Nebraska and owned by Kevin Ballard. I talked to Ballard Friday.
He said they hire young people from inner cities all over the country, train them to sell, then take them to various cities.
"We're 100 percent legitimate," said Ballard, who started the company in 2006.
They drop the sales teams off in neighborhoods around the city in the morning, tell them to sell, sell, sell, then pick them up in the evening
That's exactly what a group of moms I met at Haggin Oak Park Thursday afternoon thought might be the case. The sales people were all over their neighborhood earlier in the week.
"I don't think we're being cased," Kim Mishkind told me. "It seems more like these are young people who may be being taken advantage of by some company."
One of the young men in question, Damonte Robinson, 22, said he didn't feel that way, but it was tough selling subscriptions door-to-door.
He'd been attending community college in Los Angeles, working toward certification to service heating and air conditioning units when his financial aid ran out and he needed a job, he said.
He saw an ad for All Can Succeed and thought he'd give it a try. He, like all the other All Can Succeed member including the man who came to my door, was very nicely dressed, which Robinson said is something the company stresses.
"You learn the importance of good manners, a firm handshake, looking people eye-to-eye," he said. He earns half of whatever he sells and said they get paid every night.
"But this is hard, especially for me. I'm not a pushy person."
The man who came to my neighborhood, Michael Carruthers, 28, from Memphis, Tenn., had the pushy part down, but apparently not the manners.
While he didn't say much to me, he got into arguments with other neighbors, calling them racist (even an African-American man who simply asked what he was selling).
The Sheriff's department had numerous calls about Carruthers starting Tuesday night and became very concerned when they couldn't find him, according to Sgt. Otis Whinery. So, when a call came in Thursday night, every cruiser in the Rosedale substation responded.
Carruthers had no identification, no peddler's permit and he was knocking on doors after dark.
It could have been a toss-up on whether to arrest him or let him off with a warning. But Whinery said once he became "verbally aggressive" with deputies, off he went.
Rodney Ballard, also with All Can Succeed, said Carruthers was one bad apple and that the company wasn't aware of the business license rules. He said they were fixing all that on Friday and hoped to be in Bakersfield a while longer.
