St. Nix toy store closes, may relocate in near future – Boulder Dail…

On Feb. 19, two months after a man attempted to buy more than $56,000 of merchandise on a bad check from Longmont’s St. Nix toy store, the store’s brick-and-mortar location at 337 Main St. closed its doors for the last time.

Nicholas Marquiess, St. Nix’s web manager (and partner of the store’s owner, Virginia Miskel), said he and Miskel plan to reopen the store in the near future, but the new location has yet to be determined.

“We are no longer putting any more time and energy into this man and what he has done to us,” the couple’s GoFundMe page reads. “We are doing everything we can to move forward.”

In the meantime, the store remains open for online business.

Marquiess and Miskel were initially considering relocating to a smaller space in Berthoud, but as of Feb. 17, Marquiess said the two were hoping to move into a new space in Longmont, about two miles north of the original store. Their goal, Marquiess said, is to “start small and build back up.”

St. Nix was forced to close for several weeks in December because a man had come into the store asking to buy “one of everything” for a toy drive for Toys for Tots. Michael Parsons, 69, attempted to buy 70 boxes of merchandise with a blank check, telling the owners to fill in the check with the amount due and wait until the following week to deposit it.

Parsons was suspected of check fraud after the incident, which cleared most of the inventory off of St. Nix’s shelves and forced Marquiess and Miskel to close the store during the holiday season, costing them tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.

However, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said his office will not press criminal charges against Parsons because St. Nix accepted a post-dated blank check from him.

“Colorado case law … establishes that when a person is accepting a check that’s either blank, or they have the knowledge that the account does not have the money in it, it negates the intent to defraud that we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” Dougherty said.

Detective Stephen Desmond of Longmont Public Safety said he had hoped for a different outcome for the victims.

“I know that the DAs are much more aggressive than they ever used to be,” Desmond said. “And I’m sure there really is case law. I don’t doubt it. I just don’t like it. … I would have liked for the victim to have been made whole criminally and civilly.”

Marquiess also said he was disappointed to learn that Parsons would not face charges, but he still has hope for the future of the store.

“(Parsons is) just going to get away with it,” Marquiess said. “It sucks that he’s not getting charged, but maybe we’ll land back on our feet at a cheaper location and be able to rebuild.”