Cops: Help us nail crooks who used kid to rob salon

In what appears to be a family affair at its worst, a man used a young girl to steal a purse containing a cell phone, credit cards and more than $1,000 in cash from a South Philly nail salon.

Police are seeking information to track down the family in the caper captured on surveillance footage aired Monday by television station 6ABC.

The video shows a man entering the VWC nail salon, on Penrose Avenue near Moyamensing, at 1 p.m. Sunday.

Police said he asked the owner of the nail salon a few questions and, moments later, two women, a young girl sporting a pink skirt and a small child strolled into the nail salon.

In the surveillance video, the man gives the girl a hand signal and she dives in between two desks, and grabs a purse while one of the women distracts an employee. The girl emerges from behind the desk and quickly stuffs the purse into a larger bag.

"The biggest problem with [these] parents is instead of teaching them good ethics [and] setting goals for the children to be self sufficient individuals, they're teaching them to be criminals," said a police official.

The owner of the salon declined to comment yesterday.

A few stores down, on the corner of Penrose Avenue, Sam Albarouki, a manager at the Penrose Diner, shook his head in disbelief.

"It's a shame they're using the child," Albarouki said. "That has to do with bad parenting. It seems like they don't care if they bring the child into danger. They're using their child as a sacrifice."

Police said that the purse and the items inside were worth $1,600. No arrests have been made.