A broken wrist for her trouble: Fresno store owner injured by violent shoplifter

In a decade of running a popular game store in northeast Fresno, Jennifer Ward says she has seen her share of break-ins, thefts, and shoplifters. But she’s dealing with an NFL-type injury this week after a violent incident involving a crook who broke her left wrist in several places.

It happened Sunday night in the store at First Street and Nees Avenue about closing time. Ward says she didn’t see how it started, but it appeared two store workers tried to stop a man who was leaving with merchandise.

The man said he had a knife. Ward says the store has a rule that nothing is worth a life, so she was calling 911 when the man “bull-rushed” her, knocking her into a concrete planter outside the store.

Ward says her wrist is broken in several places after the incident.

“I’ll be in a cast at least a month,” she said. “I also have a cut on my chin.”

That means she won’t be playing her bass guitar or commuting to work on her bicycle for a while.

Crazy Squirrel is a popular store for gamers, and it has been the target of burglaries, including one that took place about 10 years ago when someone took thousands of dollars worth of magic cards. On another occasion, someone used a pickax to damage the building in a break-in.

But violence is something else, said Ward.

“It makes me apprehensive,” she said, even to the point of wondering if workers should be equipped with less-lethal countermeasures, such as a stun-gun. But she also worries about the legal ramifications of that.

Also, “if someone gets hurt...the bad kind of outweighs the good,” she said.

“It is exhausting that some people think they have the right to take things that aren’t theirs.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 4:36 PM.