Ex-RadioShack worker accused of stealing nude photos from phone
A former RadioShack employee in Corte Madera was charged with stealing revealing photos from the smartphone of a woman who had brought in the device to have its cracked screen fixed.
Jose Robert Miranda, 24, of Richmond did not enter a plea when he appeared Monday in a Marin County court on a felony charge of theft and copying computer data and a related misdemeanor.
Miranda and RadioShack have also been named in a civil suit filed last month by the San Francisco woman, identified only in court records as Jane Doe.
The case is similar to one of a former California Highway Patrol officer who was sentenced to probation last week for stealing racy photos from the cell phones of two women he came across while on patrol and sharing them with colleagues.
The woman in the RadioShack case brought her phone to the store in the Corte Madera Town Center on Nov. 16 because the glass screen was cracked, the suit says.
Then, on Jan. 8, while deleting old photos from her tablet, which was synced to her smartphone, she discovered that at least 17 “extremely revealing, nude and nearly nude” pictures she had taken of herself had been texted from her phone to an unfamiliar number, said her attorney, Timothy Osborn.
She realized that the texts were made when her phone was at RadioShack, Osborn said.
“Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that RadioShack would have done something like this,” Osborn said. “It was a simple repair, and it’s just totally outrageous.”
The woman reported the incident to Central Marin Police Authority investigators, who arrested Miranda and presented a case to county prosecutors. The district attorney’s office filed a criminal complaint Thursday.
The defendants have not responded to the suit in court. In a statement, RadioShack officials said they were “working closely with the authorities” and took “the accusations against the former employee very seriously.”
By: Henry K. Lee
originally published in the SF Gate on February 2, 2015
