Did Meijer call police on teen autistic employee for eating discarded fruit cups?

In August 2025, at least tens of millions of online users viewed posts and videos claiming a police body-camera video showed a law enforcement officer arresting a 16-year-old Meijer supermarket employee named James Denison — a person who reportedly faces food insecurity and supposedly lives with autism or other special needs — at the grocery chain’s Seven Hills, Ohio, store, located south of Cleveland.

According to users’ posts, a purported Meijer manager, Joseph Kolacsky, allegedly reported that Denison — whom some users described as “disabled” or “mentally challenged” — violated a company theft policy by taking and eating discarded food from the store’s trash for a number of weeks or months, including fruit cups, chicken and other items. Users alleged the store’s manager, or other officials, watched for months as the suspect repeatedly took food without paying for the items, all in an effort to build a case against him for an eventual arrest. Some users called for a boycott of the U.S. Midwest supermarket chain, including drawing comparisons between the Meijer family’s purported $15.9 billion net worth and the significantly lower cumulative cost of the suspect’s stolen food.

While the in-question video truly showed a Seven Hills Police Department officer arresting an employee named “James” at the Meijer store in Seven Hills, an examination of all available evidence found users promoted numerous inaccurate or unsupported statements about the matter.

A Meijer incident report, partially visible in the body-camera video, displays James’ last name as “Glenboski,” not “Denison.” The report, which police provided to Snopes, alleges the suspect stole chicken, rotisserie chicken, wings and fountain drinks from the “deli area,” “hot food area” and “grab and go” section — with no mention of discarded food, as users claimed. The report also details the timeline from the company discovering the suspect’s activity to his arrest as occurring between March 2-7 — not a months-long investigation as users alleged — including looking back as far as Feb. 19 to document further thefts totaling $110.88. Minutes into the video, the suspect tells the officer he’s 19, not 16. As of this writing, online searches found no credible evidence that would allow independent researchers to confirm the suspect lives with autism or other special needs. We also located no information confirming the suspect faced food insecurity at the time of the arrest.

Further, a TikTok user claiming to be Kolacsky’s son said in an Aug. 20 video that the arrest — occurring on March 7, 2024 — took place long before his father began working as a store director or manager at the location in early August 2025. “I just hope that this information gets out there and people start realizing that this isn’t him,” the user said in the clip. “And maybe some of the hateful messages will slow down or stop, and people will realize, you can’t believe everything you see on the internet.” (Snopes independently confirmed the TikTok user’s identity with a driver’s license photo as Joseph Kolacsky, meaning he shared the same first name as the man he said is his father.)

We contacted Meijer to ask if it could also officially confirm Kolacsky — a man facing a fierce wave of online harassment, as was his son — had no involvement with the arrest occurring over 18 months ago. We also attempted to reach a man named James Glenboski, and some of his relatives, through phone numbers listed on public-records websites. Searches for social media accounts for the same name found no results.

In a statement (archived) Meijer published on its official Facebook page on Aug. 20, the store acknowledged an arrest occurred last year but did not mention any names — as is normal with employee privacy standards. The company said it “take[s] this very seriously and recognize that the situation should have been handled differently.” The store also added, “Earlier this year, we implemented a new procedure to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

(Meijer/Facebook)

Users also shared screenshots showing a different Meijer statement from a Facebook comment users said the company posted prior to its formal statement. That since-removed comment, no longer appearing under the post pictured in one of the screenshots, read in part, “The video (taken last year) only shows a snippet of the full story, which is understandably leading to a lot of misinformation. The former team member knowingly committed multiple thefts over the course of multiple months, which is why local law enforcement was involved.”

Users make claims without checking facts

In one example of a person sharing the rumor without first verifying the details, on Aug. 21, a manager of comedian Jimmy Dore’s YouTube channel The Jimmy Dore Show posted a video (archived) with the title, “SHOCKING Reason Supermarket Had Disabled Teen Employee ARRESTED!” The post, receiving over 153,000 views, featured a description reading in part, “James Denison, a 16-year-old disabled deli worker for the Meijer supermarket chain, was arrested after Meijer management accused him of taking $110 worth of discarded food over several months. Police bodycam footage shows James calmly explaining he had only eaten food that was being thrown away, but the store chose to treat it as theft.”

(“The Jimmy Dore Show”/YouTube)

In Dore’s video, he displayed for viewers an X post (archived) receiving over 21 million views. Other popular posts included a TikTok video (archived) with 14 million views and an X post (archived) receiving nearly 9 million views. Additionally, other users shared the name and supposed photo of Joseph Kolacsky as the store manager allegedly responsible for notifying police, despite providing no credible evidence of that being the case. Users shared this rumor on Bluesky, Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), TikTok (archived) and X (archived).

Ohio-based WKRC-TV on Local12.com, Michigan-based MLive.com and New York Post all published articles about the arrest with the name “James Denison,” as well as the claims about the suspect living with autism. A reporter for MLive.com told us the site sourced the name and autism claim from a since-deleted GoFundMe fundraiser page, then later updated the story. An archived version of the GoFundMe page displayed the suspect’s name as “James Danison,” as opposed to other users claiming his name as “Denison.” On the archived page, the fundraiser’s organizer said the person “came across” the arrest video online, and did not provide any information indicating they knew the suspect. We contacted GoFundMe to ask if it could tell us why the fundraiser page disappeared.

We also emailed Dore to ask him to provide evidence for the claims, as well as the other two publishers to request information for how they independently confirmed the “Denison” last name and autism claim. We will update this story if we receive details.

Examining the video and evidence

On March 21, 2025, a manager of the Bodycam Fails YouTube channel posted the full-length, body-camera arrest video with the title, “Teen Arrested For Stealing Lunches At Work.”

A “police blotter” report from Cleveland.com, published on March 29, 2024, documented the arrest as occurring on March 7. The report did not name the suspect, only identifying him as a resident of Parma, Ohio. The report also did not mention discarded food, only saying the suspect “had taken numerous food and drink items from the deli area to the team member break room, where he consumed the merchandise without paying“:

On March 7, police were dispatched to Meijer regarding a shoplifting incident at the Broadview Road store.

The loss prevention officer said the suspect was a Meijer employee who had taken numerous food and drink items from the deli area to the team member break room, where he consumed the merchandise without paying.

The caller said the employee had used the same MO on multiple occasions dating back to February.

The value of stolen items was more than $110.

The Parma man was arrested for theft.

The body-camera video shows a Seven Hills Police Department officer arriving on the scene and walking into a windowless office located near the front of the Meijer store. Near the beginning of the clip, an unidentified man working for Meijer names the suspect only as James. He tells the officer, “He works in our deli department and we found out that he’s been taking just, like, orders of chicken and fruit cups and stuff like that off the shelf.”

While the unidentified Meijer official talks to the officer, the clip shows the officer reading over an incident report displaying the Meijer logo. That report, only partially visible in the video, lists out, line-by-line, items Meijer alleges James stole. The full report, provided to Snopes by the Seven Hills Police Department, says that a Meijer official only learned of James’ actions — including allegedly not paying for chicken, rotisserie chicken, wings and fountain drinks — on March 2. The reporting Meijer official wrote that he then checked the employee’s timecard, reviewed security footage from past shifts and found previous thefts as far back as Feb. 19. In other words, the report’s text suggested Meijer spent less than one week — not months — compiling data on James’ alleged thefts, despite some users’ falsely claiming the company waited months to arrest him.

In the video, the officer then confirms the total amount of stolen food from Feb. 19 to March 7 as $110.88, learns the suspect walks to work the job and places him in handcuffs. At no point in the video does the unidentified Meijer official verbally mention to the officer that the food the suspect allegedly stole was discarded or headed for the trash, or items already in the trash. Instead, the report’s author documented all of the suspect took the food and drinks from the “deli area,” “hot food area” and “grab and go” section.

At the 3:43 mark in the body-camera video, the officer asks the suspect about the theft charge while walking to the officer’s car. In response, he explains his actions “started off slow,” then continued for months. He also said he “meant to pay it back” but his shift breaks didn’t afford enough time to both stand in line to pay for and then eat the food:

OFFICER: This ever happened before?

JAMES: Uh, no. So, yeah, um, I explained to them that, um, the, that it started off slow. It happened a couple of times just because like I forgot my wallet or something, and then I meant to pay it back, and then when I had my wallet like the following day or something, I either just forgot or, um, which I didn’t know who to talk to, and then, um …

OFFICER: Like it just kind of spiraled?

JAMES: Yeah. A few months, like about a month or two ago, um, my managers, um, called me in the back…

Ok.

JAMES: … and complained that I took too long on my breaks.

OFFICER: Ok.

JAMES: Then, I tried to explain to them that a lot of that time was because I was waiting in line to pay for the food or I was trying to grab something, and they said that if it kept happening, they would write me up.

OFFICER: Ok.

At the 5:38 mark in the video, the officer asks for the suspect’s age. The suspect responds — during the arrest in March 2024 — that he’s 19, not 16 as users claimed. A public record available on Whitepages.com for a man named James Glenboski listed a current age as 21. Other public-records websites also list his place of residence as a mailing address located near the supermarket — a detail shedding light on the information from the video, in which he told the officer he walked to the supermarket job.

Reddit post from March 2024

On March 9, 2024, a Reddit user posting (archived) on the r/antiwork subreddit described a story that very closely resembled that of the video-recorded arrest from just two days before. That Reddit user did not mention any names or the location of the Meijer store but did say — written in the present tense — that a “friend who’s in high school got fired” for eating discarded food, including fried chicken. The post included some sensitive details, as well. The user’s page showed no activity since April 2025. Even so, we contacted the person to ask questions and will update this story if we receive further details.

For further reading, a previous fact-check article examined a rumor from 2017 claiming sex traffickers drugged and nearly abducted a woman in the bathroom of a Meijer store in Michigan.