According to the story, an employee reported the SUV as stolen. That's a specific criminal offense.
I agree that the cops dropped the ball here, but that's how it became a criminal case.
It was a criminal case because of the stolen vehicle warrant. The employee was management. You know, the buck stops here kinda thing like who authorized the company attorney to file the charges or if the attorney was even consulted. The bottom line, it was the name of the dealership on the warrant, not a personal issue not implicating the dealership.
In any case, if I were the management who supposedly made that decision, I would have naturally elevated it to the owner to handle along with my acknowledgement and apologies that a huge mistake was made to the ownership, along with my immediate recognition that my salary would be docked for the error and accepting whatever else the ownership thought was appropriate.