Broward baker blamed Uber driver for $3K in missing cinnamon rolls. CBP had him

Last Saturday, Julie Pierre baked, boxed, and loaded more than 300 cinnamon rolls into an Uber bound for the Yellow Green Farmers Market in Hollywood.

But while they were supposed to arrive by 10 a.m., they never did.

Pierre, the 21-year-old owner of Roll & Dough, says she frantically called and texted the courier more than a dozen times and got nothing back. She put the loss at about $3,100 and said so in a TikTok video that promptly went viral. A Florida International University criminal justice major who started the bakery as a side hustle after her financial aid was delayed, Pierre had only been selling at the Hollywood market since Aug. 1.

“This money quite literally pays for my payroll,” Pierre said in the video. “It pays for the kitchen that we’re using [and] the bakery that we’re also in the process of building out. It pays for so much that I literally wanted to cry right there.”

The driver hadn’t stolen the cinnamon rolls

As it turns out, however, her driver hadn’t stolen anything. He’d actually been pulled over mid-delivery by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on I-95 near Sheridan Street that morning.

Agents stopped his car “following a records check,” a CBP spokesperson wrote in a statement to New Times. The driver, Ivan Dario Rico Molano, “admitted to being in the United States without legal authorization” and was taken to the Dania Beach Border Patrol Station for processing, the agency said. CBP says Molano, a Colombian citizen, entered the country legally in May 2021 and overstayed his authorized period.

The Sunrise Police Department, where Pierre filed a report about the missing rolls, confirmed as much. “The investigation determined that a theft did not occur,” a department spokesperson wrote in a statement to New Times.

For days, she had no idea what happened

For several days, Pierre says, she knew none of this. “The order never reached its destination, we could not contact the carrier, and no one — including Uber — could tell us what had happened,” she wrote in a statement posted to Instagram Thursday evening. She says Uber instructed her to file a police report, which she did.

On Thursday, Sunrise detectives told her the rest.

The department said Molano could call someone to take possession of the Kia before agents took him in. That person later contacted Sunrise police to arrange the return. Officers recovered the rolls Thursday, five days after they were baked, and returned them to Pierre. (She says she threw them out.)

Roll & Dough apologizes and corrects the record

In her statement, Pierre wrote that as a 21-year-old running a small business alone, she’d been “scared, overwhelmed, and trying to recover days of work and thousands of dollars in products.”

“We are sincerely sorry that we described the situation that way before learning the complete circumstances,” the statement reads. “We shared what we genuinely understood at the time, and now that detectives have provided us with new information, we are publicly correcting the record.”

Pierre also pushed back on the suggestion that her report led to Molano’s arrest, writing that he was detained during the delivery and before she went to police. His immigration case, she wrote, “is separate from our missing-property report.” She turned off comments on the post, saying she wouldn’t let her page become a space for harassment toward Molano, his family, or her business.