Three Houston-area men led investigators on a months-long chase after a brazen string of cash register thefts that hopscotched across Central Texas — and it took everything from local police to federal marshals to finally reel them all in.
On November 12, 2025, Cedric Ryan Scales Jr., 19, Isaiah Jacob Jaramillo, 23, and Ca’Den Dejuan Johnson, 21, allegedly targeted multiple Poco Loco restaurant locations in a coordinated theft spree that stretched from Kyle all the way back toward Houston. The suspects are accused of walking out with cash registers — plural — as they made their way down the corridor between the two cities. It wasn’t a smash-and-grab. It was a road trip with a criminal itinerary.
A String of Charges, A Slow Net
All three men now face charges of burglary of a building and engaging in organized criminal activity — the latter charge alone signaling that authorities don’t view this as a couple of guys making bad decisions on the fly. This was coordinated, prosecutors allege. Deliberate. The kind of thing that earns a separate, heavier count on the indictment.
Still, rounding them up took time. Johnson was the first to fall — picked up on December 8, 2025, by Angleton Police, though that arrest stemmed from a separate robbery charge. Jaramillo wasn’t taken into custody until January 13, 2026, when U.S. Marshals tracked him down. And Scales? He held out the longest, finally arrested on March 5, 2026 — also by U.S. Marshals — more than three months after the original Poco Loco incidents. All three arrests were connected, at least in part, to a stolen firearms investigation out of Angleton.
That’s the catch. What started as restaurant burglaries spiraled into a much wider investigation involving weapons — a reminder of how quickly low-level theft cases can expand once law enforcement starts pulling threads.
The Bigger Picture
How does something like this happen across so many jurisdictions without an immediate arrest? It’s a fair question. Multi-county crime sprees are notoriously difficult to prosecute quickly — different agencies, different case files, different priorities. The involvement of U.S. Marshals in two of the three apprehensions suggests the suspects weren’t exactly staying put, either.
The Poco Loco thefts weren’t isolated in the broader regional crime conversation, either. Central Texas law enforcement has been grappling with a string of unsettling incidents. Separately, Williamson County Sheriff’s Office Commander John Foster recently spoke out about an alleged attempted kidnapping at a Georgetown park — a case that rattled the community in a different but equally disturbing way. “It’s just not normal, I mean honestly, that something like this happens,” Foster said — a line that, stripped of its specific context, could apply to a lot of what’s unfolded across the region in recent months.
What Comes Next
With all three suspects now in custody, prosecutors will have to untangle overlapping charges across multiple counties and jurisdictions. The organized criminal activity charge is particularly significant — it carries steeper penalties and suggests authorities believe the Poco Loco thefts weren’t opportunistic. Someone, they allege, had a plan.
Whether that plan extended to the firearms investigation in Angleton, or whether the two threads simply crossed paths during the course of separate inquiries, remains to be seen as the cases move through the courts. What’s clear is that a string of restaurant cash register thefts — the kind of crime that might have once been written off as minor — ended with federal marshals involved and three men facing serious felony exposure.
Sometimes the register isn’t the only thing that gets taken apart.
