Teenagers broke Ballantyne restaurants’ windows with rocks, police say

Two 16-year-olds were arrested Monday after using rocks to break into several restaurants in Ballantyne, looking for money in cash registers, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police said.

Lamariay Witherspoon and Douglas Mobley will be charged with several offenses, Capt. Todd Lontz said Monday afternoon.

Lontz said some of the restaurants had no money in their cash registers – partly because so many people pay with cards now, and also because that’s a smart business practice, he said.

“For the effort they went through and the damage they did, it probably was not worth what they got out of it,” Lontz said. He refused to say how much money was stolen.

The teenagers broke into five restaurants in two Ballantyne shopping centers, police said. They also attempted to break into Kabuto Japanese Steakhouse and Chipotle on Pineville-Matthews Road, but they weren’t successful there, police said.

Witherspoon and Mobley were arrested in Huntersville, where they had started a similar string of burglaries, police said. Lontz said Huntersville police identified their car based on a description from the Ballantyne burglaries.

Huntersville Police chased the teens, who crashed their car just before 4:30 a.m. One of them had a gun that had been stolen in Charlotte, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police said.

The Ballantyne burglaries all happened within about an hour, starting around 1:15 a.m., Lontz said. The five restaurants involved were JJ’s Red Hots, Pizza Hut and Chef Kwo on John J. Delaney Drive and B. Good and Burger 21 on Ballantyne Village Way.

This story was originally published November 27, 2017 at 6:20 PM with the headline "Teenagers broke Ballantyne restaurants’ windows with rocks, police say."