An unemployed woman from Ohio has been charged in court for taking $2.87 out of a local fountain so she could buy food.
Deidre Romine was approached by a police officer who spied her picking coins out of the Logan County Courthouse fountain in Bellefontaine, Ohio on Oct. 7.
"The cop asked me what I was doing and I was afraid to tell him," Romine said on WBNS-10TV. "The money didn't belong to anybody, so I just took it out of there."
The law enforcement official questioned Romine on-site, and eventually found the change he said she'd stolen in her pocket. He then handed her a summons to show up in court on grounds that she committed petty theft.
But Romine told the local news station that she hasn't had a job for a while, and has been scrambling to eat and pay bills. She said she'll soon be evicted from her apartment after falling behind on rent, and is concerned that she'll go to jail for fishing the coins out of the fountain.
"I'm trying to feed myself and I've got four cats I'm raising and trying to feed them," she said. "I might go to jail."
But Romine might see some financial aid in the near future, as one supporter has started up on online donation effort to help Romine fight the case by spreading the word.
"We want the community to know the why rather than just the headline that she got arrested, and we also want to help her out," Will Zell, who initiated the online fund, told the New York Daily News.
The fund has already raised almost $2,000 as of Thursday, surpassing the initial goal ten times over. Zell told the Daily news that any money raised will go straight to Romine's case manager.
