New target, different outcome for accused thief

Maybe he should have stuck with Lowe’s Home Improvement stores.

Federal authorities are seeking to transfer Devin Dawson, 20, from the Chicago area to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he and four others are charged with thefts across the Midwest.

All except one of their 38 targets were Lowe’s stores, authorities say. But on May 5, Dawson and others allegedly hit a Home Depot in west suburban Oak Brook Terrace.

And that theft was Dawson’s undoing.

He struck an Oak Brook Terrace police detective with a Buick while fleeing the scene of a $475 theft of the Home Depot, prosecutors say.

Dawson hit the detective “head-on like a bug on his windshield,” DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin said in a written statement earlier this year. The detective suffered minor injuries.

In September, Dawson was sentenced to six months in the DuPage County Jail. He had pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and forgery, court records show.

Now the feds want him to join his four co-defendants in Iowa, where they face federal charges of stealing thousands of dollars of merchandise from Lowe’s stores — and the one Home Depot store — in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin between February and May.