September 22, 2006

By MARY AMES

Frontiersman A young couple with an apparent weakness for cheesecake walked into Alaska Cheesecake about 4 p.m. a couple of weeks ago and swiped an entire cake, along with napkins and forks.

The case of the heisted dessert never was reported to police because Pat O'Donohue, owner of the store, didn't want to bother them.

“I know how busy they are,” O'Donohue said.

It was around Sept. 5, she said, and the couple came into the store while O'Donohue was taking care of a customer at the counter. She told them she would be right with them, but had to step in the back a moment.

After she left the front of the store, the young man nabbed the closest cheesecake, which happened to be coconut, and walked out of the store, leaving a trail of white flakes. The woman asked the customer to step aside, and grabbed some napkins and forks, said O'Donohue. As the woman walked out the door, O'Donohue returned from the back, and the surprised customer told her he thought they had taken a cheesecake.

“He ran out to find them,” she said. “It annoyed him he had stepped aside.”

O'Donohue said the pair couldn't have been more than 20 years old, and both were on the short side.

“She was tinier than me, and he was about 5-foot-7,” she said. “She hadn't had a bath for a while. They were obviously in a bad way, coming down off something.”

O'Donohue said they looked gray to her, dressed in gray and dirty, and they looked like they'd been on the run for a couple of days.

“They obviously needed it more than me,” she said. “I've had people complain about the price before, but no one ever stole a cake.”

O'Donohue moved her shop north on the Parks Highway from its former location in

front of Fred Meyer early last summer.

“This is a different scene down here,” she said. “A mile and a half down the road and it's a whole different crowd.”

Contact Mary Ames at

352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.