BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Was it vigilante justice carried out by a store clerk fed up with runaway petty crime?

Evidence of an increasingly unjust society: a starving man, stealing food, slain unnecessarily by an overzealous employee?

Or was it self-defense: a battle between natural foes, order versus chaos, rule of law versus desperation, taken to an unforeseeable extreme?

These are questions we all might ask following unusual homicide at a local chain discount store five months ago.

Dollar Tree employees had seen this kind of thing before: A man in a sweatshirt and baggy jeans walking up and down the aisles of the store, clutching a bucket loaded with merchandise. Now he was lingering suspiciously at a display near the alarm-wired rear exit. This had all the hallmarks of another shoplifting incident.

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But the evening of Feb. 21, 2024, things ended differently than anyone could have expected.

Security footage taken inside the Dollar Tree shows the conspicuous customer, at 6:03 p.m., calmly dropping items from store shelves into the plastic bucket he’d brought with him. Then, after pausing for perhaps a full minute at a display in a rear corner of the store, he sprints out the back door.

In his year of employment at that East Bakersfield Dollar Tree discount store, located in the Lowe’s strip mall on Columbus Street, 22-year-old cashier Dylan Matthew Franco had seen dozens of shoplifters, so when the disheveled customer set off the alarm, he sprang into action.

Franco and a loss prevention employee bolted out the front door and peeled off in opposite directions. Outdoor security cameras at the Social Security Administration office next door showed Franco, the store employee, running out the front door and down the west side of the building toward the back door, apparently intending to confront the shoplifter, later identified as Aaron Tyler Delgado, age 36.

Delgado had been through some hard times. He’d lost his job in a warehouse, broken up with the mother of his five children and now was living on the street. His aunt said he often went hungry.

“The difficulties — things happened, relationships happen, they sometimes crumble,” said April Hungary, Delgado’s aunt.

Franco, the store clerk, knew it was against store policy to chase shoplifters, but he pursued the thief anyway — perhaps, in a subconscious sense, on behalf of the thousands, maybe millions of clerks who for years now have seen merchandise walk out the door at markets, pharmacies, and general stores across California.

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Franco ran around behind the building, and there he was, Delgado, the shoplifter, trying to climb a high concrete retaining wall.

Autumn Paine, of the Kern County Public Defender’s office, took over Franco’s defense in mid-May.

“The thief comes over the fence, and immediately is on him,” she said. “There’s a fight. During the fight the thief pulls a knife and comes at Dylan.”

The two men struggle briefly and then suddenly Franco, the store employee, pulls away, turns and takes off running. In a brief reversal of roles, Delgado begins to chase the store clerk — but then he stops. He can be seen on security video stumbling a few steps toward a grassy area and then, just out of view of the camera, collapsing.

“Here is Aaron, hungry, it was in the evening,” Hungary said. “I don’t even know if my nephew ate all day. All he was doing was trying to grab something to eat.”

Francisco Martinez and Haydee Elvira were at the nearby San Clemente Mission, attending a prayer service when, about 30 minutes in, a long-haired transient came through the door and approached them. “Look, boss,” the man said in Spanish, “there’s a man over there that looks dead; there’s a lot of blood.” Martinez and Elvira ran outside and scoured the area but they found nothing. Martinez borrowed a car and widened the search. That’s when he spotted Delgado, the shoplifter, lying on his side, eyes wide open. Martinez called the police. An hour and 20 minutes after the shoplifter’s confrontation with the Dollar Tree clerk, emergency personnel arrived.

Delgado was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to court documents, he had a cut on his hand and a stab wound on his left side just below his armpit.

Officers spotted several unopened food items covered in blood on the ground behind the store — frozen chimichangas, chicken pot pies, some dog treats. A trail of blood led from the scattered packages of food to Delgado’s body. Among Delgado’s personal effects was a blue and silver “harvesting” knife — the type used for cutting sod — and the driver license of another person, a 28-year-old man responders initially took to belong to the slain 36-year-old.

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About an hour later, at a Subway sandwich shop 100 yards across the parking lot from the Dollar Tree, an employee closing up for the night found a blood-soaked gray sweatshirt in the women’s restroom trash can. The manager called the police.

Police believe Franco, the store clerk, had been wearing blue jeans and a gray zip-up sweatshirt the night in question.

At some point Franco returned to the Dollar Tree store to resume his shift. But, scheduled to serve as the closing cashier, he left work 30 minutes early, saying his ride home was outside waiting. His girlfriend later told police that she noticed a scratch on his chin that evening, and that he seemed unusually stressed.

After reviewing security video and cell-tower data, police took Franco into custody without incident the next day after the fatal confrontation. He is charged with first degree murder and facing a life term.

“They’re running their stores, they’re trying to make a paycheck, feed their families, and you have dangerous people going into stores,” Paine said. “They take whatever they want without consequence, and they attack people, they attack the people who are showing up to do their jobs. And that’s what happened in this situation.”

Officers went to Franco’s house and, with his mother’s permission, searched his bedroom. They confiscated a black T-shirt from the hamper and seized a nametag: “ DOLLAR TREE / Dylan / May I help you?”

“The employee went out the front door, had no business going out against store policy, and he wound up taking Aaron’s life,” Hungary said. “Over some food. It’s outrageous.”

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Franco, through his attorneys, declined multiple interview requests.

But Franco’s parents, Art Franco and Melissa Cardoza, gave 17 News a statement. It read, in part: “None of us could know that he would face a violent person who was desperate enough to openly steal from a store and then attack Dylan. We hate to think what may have happened had he not been able to defend himself that day, and we are at a loss as to how he is now in jail only because he survived an act of violence.”

These have been difficult times for Delgado’s mother, Charlotte Hungary, who raised four sons. In 2019, one of them, Ruben, was struck by a car and left paralyzed; in 2020, her husband Fred passed away; in 2021, yet another son died — Fred junior. And now Aaron.

Vernon Echavarria is the fourth brother. His girlfriend, Naima Reyes, said she just wishes people understood what a gentle soul Aaron Delgado was.

“It’s not fair,” Reyes said. “The whole point is, Aaron — like there’s people that go and steal TVs and iPhones and they steal from people. He wasn’t stealing anything like that, he wasn’t stealing to get money. He was stealing to get food.”

Franco, the store clerk, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, is held without bail. It is not his first case. He has a string of arrests going back to 2020, when he was 18. Most were petty, including three arrests for vandalism with damage exceeding $400, but he has also been convicted of battery, driving under the influence of drugs, and grand theft auto. His alleged involvement in Delgado’s death marks his fourth felony arrest – two more than the shoplifter he stands accused of killing.

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Delgado’s rap sheet includes two arrests last year for occupying a substandard building — not unusual for a habitually homeless man — but also, in 2020, spousal abuse outside the Bakersfield Greyhound station in the presence of their children, and, in 2016, battery with serious bodily injury, for which he served time at Wasco State Prison. Delgado, two of his brothers and a fourth man allegedly kicked, punched and stabbed Delgado’s brother-in-law into unconsciousness over an unpaid debt.

A few days after Delgado’s death, three carloads of individuals — perhaps a dozen — burst into the Dollar Tree store and created a scene. Disguised with bandanas and sunglasses, they pillaged store shelves and shouted accusations.

Bakersfield police had no information on the flash-mob shoplifting incident at Dollar Tree, but store employees and two of Franco’s attorneys confirmed it happened.

Paine said it doesn’t really matter what Delgado’s motivation was for shoplifting on her client’s watch. He was in the wrong.

“Every single time that I’ve been into a ‘dollar store,’ someone has walked in, picks up stuff, and just walked out,” Paine said. “And people know that they can just do that. You can walk in, take whatever you want, and walk out. Are they hungry? Maybe. Are they poor? Maybe. Does that give them the right to do this? Absolutely not.”

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Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer conceded that business owners and their employees are fed up with petty crime.

“There’s a lot of frustration,” Zimmer said. “There’s a lot of business owners who think they’re going to have to take self-help. Take matters into their own hands in order to keep their businesses. And that’s a very sad state for us to be in.”

And on rare occasions, that will result in violence.

“But you can’t shoot at someone who’s committing a petty theft from your business,” Zimmer said.

The fatal confrontation underscores the depth of poverty in a modern society hobbled by vast economic disparity. Opinions in the community appear split on the lesson we ought to take away from this. As to the irony of it, there’s broad agreement.

What are the rest of us to make of this chaos? How do we best navigate a world where many are fed up with brazen shoplifting and runaway crime, but hunger and homelessness persist in a nation full of millionaires and billionaires? That’s a question we have yet to work out.

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