Picking & Sinning: East Nashville Music Store Owners Nab Mandolin Thief

EAST NASHVILLE, TN — Owners of an East Nashville music shop were able to chase down a shoplifter, recover the mandolin he tried to steal and recorded the whole thing on cell phone video.

Now, Metro Police are working to identify the suspect.

Saturday afternoon, two men entered Fanny's House of Music on Holly Street in East Nashville. The owners of the store felt a little iffy about these two customers and kept a close watch on them.

"I noticed one of them was holding a jacket up, like he was putting the jacket on the other fellow," store owner Pamela Cole told NewsChannel 5. "The other owner’s friend said to check their jacket."

Cole, her co-owner and the friend followed the two men into the street, recording the entire confrontation via cell phone, which was then shared by East Precinct detectives:

After a struggle — with his jacket, which was not exactly made for transporting mandolins — the man gave up the instrument and he and his accomplice fled on foot. Cole told WKRN the mandolin was priced at $1,500, a loss that could be extraordinarily harmful to a business the size of Fanny's.

"As a small business owner, it can put me out of business,” she said. “Most people are stealing for a reason. They don’t just steal because they find it fun; they’re stealing because they have a problem of some sort.”

Instrument thefts are common, particularly in a music-industry town like Nashville that has a significant number of new and used music shops. Instruments don't depreciate much, so stolen instruments can be pawned or resold for a significant amount of money. Walter Carter of Carter's Vintage Guitars told NewsChannel 5 that music store owners stay in touch — at least weekly in many cases — to combat theft.

"We communicate more with police and with each other," he said. "If someone has told us to be on the lookout for a stolen instrument, we may talk to another store."

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