A 25-year-old former South Florida Starbucks employee is accused of stealing a cell phone from a former co-worker to send sexually explicit images to himself without their consent, police said.
A Doral barista called police in September, reporting that a coworker allegedly took her phone during a night shift in July while it was charging near the back of the store, where the manager’s office is located. According to the police report, she had never met that coworker, later identified as Benjamin Alvarez, before that day, as he usually worked at a different location.
She told Doral police that Alvarez asked what year she was born and she didn’t realize that she was giving him the password to her cellphone. A bit later, when she noticed her phone was missing, another coworker told her to check with Alvarez, “since he had a record of cellphones gone missing when he is working” and is “known to take peoples property and sending himself information from peoples cellphone with peoples permission,” the report states.
Not long after, the victim told police that she noticed deleted messages on her phone. When she checked those messages, she told police that she found that Alvarez had allegedly sent himself “nude photographs” and “sexual videos” clearly showing her face that the victim had stored on her phone.
Alvarez was arrested Tuesday outside his parents’ home in Doral and charged with sexual cyber harassment, grand theft, offense against an electronic device and resisting an officer without violence.
