Cyrena Anne Quast didn’t set out to steal in hopes of becoming famous.
She is 35 years old, lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and on August 30, police arrested her in Monticello on suspicion of taking two double-packs of batteries for power tools, valued at about $580. An employee recognized her from a similar theft two days earlier and called the police. According to the complaint, she eventually admitted that she had taken them.
Up to that point, it was a minor theft story like thousands of others. But when the New York Post published her mugshot, the internet didn’t see a suspect: it saw Jennifer Lopez. Memes, jokes about ‘Jenny from the Block,’ and users swearing there was a glitch in the Matrix flooded X within minutes, racking up nearly 2 million views. No one confirmed any actual relation to the singer, but that didn’t stop anyone from asking JLo for a DNA test with her alleged ‘lost sister’.