Police have detained two men, identified as Marvin Bradley and Steven Choc, and will charge them with robbery, aggravated assault and attempted robbery tomorrow, Tuesday, in connection with a bold morning robbery on Freetown Road Sunday that left one of the robbers dead.
Usually it is the storeowner who is shot, but this time a robber was shot dead after he and two accomplices attempted an armed robbery of a small grocery shop on Freetown Road yesterday morning.
Dennis Chow, 42, proprietor of Garden Shop at #42 Freetown Road, told police that he was at his store around 11:30 Sunday morning tending to a Hispanic customer, when three men, two dark-skinned and the other clear-skinned, entered. (He declined to speak with us when we visited the store this afternoon.)
One of the darker men wore a blue stocking over his face. He took out a 9mm pistol, pointed it at the shopkeeper and ordered, “Nobody f—ing move.”
One of the other customers, who had fetched his machete from outside the shop when he saw the young men enter, started to struggle with the gunman, and one shot went off from the gun.
Taking advantage of the confusion, the lighter-skinned man dashed behind the counter and took $600 from the cash drawer, then returned to help the gunman and the third robber, now both struggling with the customer.
It was then, police say, that a fearful Chow intervened by taking out his licensed 9mm pistol and firing three shots in the direction of the struggling men.
All three fled, but one, later identified as Jermaine Gomez, 20, of #32 Water Lane, collapsed outside in the middle of Freetown Road and was later pronounced dead of gunshot injuries to the right side of his chest, right armpit and right lower back at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. The other two robbers escaped up Freetown Road.
At press time this evening, Amandala was unable to speak with the deceased Gomez’s relatives, who were not in when we visited around 2:00 this afternoon.
Belizean public opinion presently has absolutely no sympathy for armed robbers, but the fundamentals of the law still have to be carried out where proper investigations are concerned.