Lawrence Dillons employee charged in $25,000 theft case

A Lawrence Dillons employee now faces a felony charge after police say about $25,000 disappeared from the West Sixth Street store, a case that began when the store’s own internal controls and investigators surfaced warning signs of possible theft.

Ethan Cade Waters, 21, was charged in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday with stealing $25,000 from the Dillons at 3000 W. Sixth St. Police had already arrested Waters earlier this month on suspicion of taking thousands of dollars from his employer, but the new complaint turned that suspicion into a formal felony case. Waters was released from the Douglas County Jail after posting a $2,500 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on June 5.

Lawrence police spokeswoman Laura McCabe said the case moved forward after the store’s asset manager brought officers evidence gathered during an internal investigation. “The asset manager presented the officer with the evidence they gathered, and the officer placed the employee under arrest,” McCabe said. She added, “We have reason to believe the employee had been stealing large sums of money from the store since the beginning of the year.” That timeline suggests the alleged losses were not a one-off event, but a pattern that stretched across months and raised deeper concerns about cash handling and workplace oversight.

The amount in the complaint places the case in a more serious category under Kansas law. Theft of property or services valued at least $25,000 but less than $100,000 is a severity level 7, nonperson felony. In practical terms, that makes the allegation far more significant than lower-level retail theft cases that local stores handle more routinely.

The case also has local weight because it involves one of Lawrence’s major grocery operators. Dillons says it has four grocery stores in Lawrence, and the West Sixth Street location sits in a busy part of the city where shoppers rely on a steady flow of groceries, pharmacy items and daily essentials. Dillons is a Kansas chain founded by Ray Dillon and later became part of Kroger, giving the store a long Kansas footprint and a familiar name for many Douglas County residents.

For the store, the case raises questions about how missing money was detected, what controls flagged the loss and what changes may follow inside the operation. For Lawrence police, it is another example of how a workplace investigation can turn into a criminal case when evidence points to a specific employee and the alleged losses climb into the tens of thousands of dollars. The complaint now puts those allegations before the court.