Woman falls in mall fountain on video, wants to sue, awaits conviction on unrelated case

Did you see the video going around earlier this week of a woman falling in a mall fountain while texting (clip below) and getting laughed at by mall cops?

Early today, a story popped up wherein the woman, offering her full name in an interview as well as her picture, complains that the video in which she is barely identifiable is mortifying. In that local news article, Cathy Cruz Marrero begins grumbling about negligence on the part of mall security:

“My issue is I don’t think security was professional because they didn’t send anyone to check on me until 20 minutes later and I had already left… Instead of laughing, they should have said, ‘Is she OK?’ and been down there right away to check on me,” she said.

By the time she’d hit ABC with her tale, Cruz Marrero had hired a lawyer. But pretty much immediately, ABC dug up some interesting information about the woman who fell in the fountain’s possible reasons for coming forward. It seems Cruz Marrero is facing some fairly serious credit card theft charges, and might soon be placed under six months of house arrest:

She has been out on $7,500 bail since her 2009 charges for alleged theft, records show… According to court records, Ileana Rivera of Reading, Pa., who worked at the Zales jewelry store in the Fairgrounds Square Mall with Marrero, reported that Marrero had used her credit cards without permission… Marrero allegedly made $4,177 in purchases at Zales and $1,055 in purchases at a Target around the time of August 2007, records show.

It also came to light that the fountain-falling texter has a prior record. Her lawyer points out that his client had no way of knowing the clip would go viral, thus negating claims she’d orchestrated the situation to precipitate a lawsuit:

“For that to be true, she would have had to known this was going to be posted to YouTube.”