photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Friday, June 26, 2026.

A man accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Dillons grocery that employed him has worked out a diversion agreement with the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office, his lawyer told a judge Wednesday.

“We have reached an agreement; it just needs to be typed up,” Hatem Chahine, the lawyer for Ethan Waters, told Senior Judge Nancy Parrish. Chahine said that DA Dakota Loomis was “working on it.”

Loomis was not present Wednesday for the status conference of Waters, who is next scheduled to appear in court in September.

A diversion agreement is an alternative to a typical prosecution. If its terms are satisfied, the criminal charge is typically dismissed and ultimately expunged from the person’s record as though it never happened.

The terms of the agreement were not mentioned in court Wednesday.

Waters, 21, reportedly confessed in May to stealing around $45,000 from the Dillons store at 3000 W. Sixth St. He used some of the money to buy a high-end gaming computer and Magic the Gathering trading cards, according to allegations in his arrest affidavit. He also said he took the money to help his father, but the affidavit does not specify anything about the father’s situation or why Waters thought he needed help.

An officer who responded to the store said he had reviewed the handwritten confession. Waters told the officer that $45,000 was a reasonable approximation of his total theft, admitting that he took $9,000 on one occasion, then $10,000, then “a couple thousand” on other occasions, according to the affidavit.

The store’s asset protection manager, agreeing that Waters had taken at least $45,000, told the officer that he had entered into a “civil agreement” for the returned $14,000 plus $6,000 more, but he said he desired to press charges on the remaining $25,000.

Waters was charged with one count of felony theft of an amount between $25,000 and $100,000 and was released shortly after his arrest on a surety bond of $2,500.