3 Escape After Sniffing Aerosols High-Seeking Teenagers Leave Grocery Out Of Whipping Cream

The young men whipped out of Yoke’s Pac ‘n Save at 4507 W. Wellesley early Saturday after running out of gas.?

Now, police want to find them. The youths didn’t pay for their whipped cream. They’ve been dubbed the Reddi Whip bandits.

“I don’t know, it’s the aerosol gas I guess,” police spokesman Dick Cottam said. “You know, how people sniff glue and use aerosols. I don’t want to give anybody any ideas.”

The three youths who showed up about 11 p.m. Friday had their own ideas. They bought $40 worth of whipped cream in aerosol cans, night manager David Ramsey said.

They told a clerk they were “going to have a party,” police said.

This was no ordinary pie-making party, apparently, because two returned for more whipped cream about two hours later, Ramsey said.

This time, the young men didn’t pay. Instead, they sucked the nitrous-oxide gas off the tops of about a dozen cans in the dairy/ beer-cooler area. They tossed them on the floor.

A clerk who found the two men in the cooler said they appeared to be intoxicated. They then took off into the parking lot.

The scene in the store’s parking lot is like a high school pep rally on weekend nights, Ramsey said. He thought he’d seen it all. He was wrong.

“I’ve never seen them do that before,” Ramsey said. “Normally the kids’ll try to get someone to buy them alcohol.”

The two are described as white males, 17 to 20 years old. One was 5 feet 11 inches tall, 180 pounds with short brown hair. The other was 5 feet 9 inches tall, 145 pounds, with blond, shoulder-length, wavy hair.

They drove off in a 1970s silver-green Nova, leaving the flattened whipped cream cans behind them, and customers with no whipped-cream choices.

“They tapped us out,” Ramsey said. “They wiped out all our stock.”

, DataTimes