Tourist Arrested in Key West After Stealing $20 from Coffee Shop Tip Jar

Elaine A. Earlywine, 63, of Morristown, New Jersey, walked into the Funky Rooster Coffee House & Wine Bar on a Sunday afternoon, made a purchase, and left with something she hadn't paid for: roughly $20 from the café's tip jar. What she didn't account for was the security camera trained on the counter at 713 Caroline St.

The incident unfolded around 12:30 p.m. on June 16, 2024. A Funky Rooster employee who had rung up Earlywine's merchandise noticed cash was missing from the tip jar and confronted Earlywine and her daughter while they were still walking out. Key West police were called, and within a couple of hours officers located the pair on the 800 block of Duval Street. Earlywine was arrested outside the Funky Chicken store at 814 Duval St., another business owned by Funky Rooster proprietor Artur Bakala, and transported to the Monroe County Detention Center on Stock Island on a misdemeanor count of petit theft.

When an officer showed Earlywine the security footage, she denied taking anything, claiming "maybe she bumped the jar but never took out money," according to the arrest report. Once handcuffed and seated in the police cruiser, she told the officer she would give the Funky Rooster employee $20 and demanded to speak with her.

For the staff at the Funky Rooster, the $20 was not an abstraction. Bakala said as much after the arrest. "My girls work hard for tips," he told Keys Weekly. "She stole food from their table." He posted the security video to Facebook, where it drew immediate and widespread outrage. He later added a still image of Earlywine being arrested outside his Duval Street store. The story spread to TikTok, with commenters zeroing in on the brazenness of a tourist reaching into the earnings of service workers in plain view of a camera.

That reaction reflects something specific about the Keys economy. From Key Largo to Key West, workers in restaurants and cafés rely on tips to cover basic bills; a cash tip jar on a counter isn't a courtesy, it's part of the paycheck. Key West already carries an above-average property crime burden, with residents facing a 1-in-45 chance of victimization compared to the national average. Bakala's choice to post the footage publicly served as a pointed message to the visitors who fill Duval Street daily: the cameras are running, the staff are paying attention, and the community will not stay quiet.

Earlywine's misdemeanor petit theft charge remains pending.