Robbery trial continues

By Ed Runyan

A former school band director said he saw the defendant run past him with janitors in pursuit.

WARREN — Witnesses called Tuesday in the aggravated robbery and felonious assault trial of Timothy R. Anderson didn’t say they saw Anderson carry out an armed robbery of $11,180 in tuition money from the Lincoln K-8 school on Atlantic Street June 16, 2008.

But two teenagers testified that they talked to Anderson, 22, of Palmyra Road, in front of the school minutes before the robbery and then saw him run out of the building afterward while wearing a mask.

A surveillance video from inside the school showed a masked man committing the robbery, and another video showed a man identified as Anderson standing in front of the building not wearing a ski mask that afternoon.

Anderson went on trial this week in the courtroom of Judge Andrew Logan in Trumbull County Common Pleas Courton charges that could land him in prison for 29 years if convicted.

Police say Anderson is the man who walked into the school on Atlantic Street Northeast at around 1 p.m., held a gun to a school employee’s head, took $11,180 in cash from summer school tuition and fled on foot.

Anderson was arrested in Nevada a couple of weeks after the robbery based on the surveillance video.

Eddie Cruz, 17, and Tiffany Robison, 18, said they had gone to summer school that day at the Lincoln K-8 building and were outside the building when Anderson, whom they did not know, walked up and started talking to Cruz about the cost of certain classes and tests offered at the school.

A short time later, after the man walked away, Cruz and Robison were smoking a cigarette in the grass near the school’s front door when they saw a man run out of the front door.

“He ran out of the building wearing a mask,” Cruz said of Anderson.

When Chris Becker, assistant county prosecutor, asked Cruz why he thought the man wearing the mask was Anderson, Cruz said, “The person I was talking to [in front of the school] had the same clothes as the person with the mask on.”

Two witnesses testified to being inside a room in the school, waiting to register their child for summer school, when the masked man walked in, took the cash and fled. The episode only lasted about 10 seconds.

Parent Kelly O’Grady-Lowery testified that parents were required to pay for the classes with cash.

Retired Warren band director Richard Bartunek said he was reading on his screened-in porch that afternoon when Anderson ran between the houses past him — not wearing a mask — followed by school janitors.

Bartunek said he didn’t know Anderson but said the man who ran past him was the same man captured on the video from the exterior of the school.

runyan@vindy.com