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Police investigate 3 armed robberies
YOUNGSTOWN
Police are investigating three separate armed robberies in the city, including one involving a Family Dollar employee attempt-ing to make a nightly deposit at the bank.
According to police reports, the 29-year-old female employee of the Belmont Avenue store locked up the business at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and quickly walked to the car of a waiting friend. The employee and her 30-year-old male escort headed to the PNC Bank on Belmont to make the store’s nightly deposit.
They pulled up near the night-deposit box, and the employee walked toward the box carrying the deposit bag, but was stopped by two armed men, one of them yelling, “Give me the bag.” Another man approached the male driver telling him to back up and not get involved.
The driver told police he punched the would-be thief, but the thief then pulled out a gun.
The employee told police she froze at the sight of the gun. One of the men, she said, snatched the bag from her hands and both men ran away.
Police are looking for two black males both wearing dark-colored hoodies and dark pants who had reportedly been hanging around the store’s parking lot just before the robbery.
Police are investigating the robbery of a 53-year-old city man who told police he was robbed of $1,100 he had withdrawn from a downtown ATM.
The man told police he went to the ATM just before noon Tuesday and was walking to a relative’s house when he was stopped by a group of men driving a bluish-green car at the intersection of Sacksville Street and Penn Avenue on the East Side. One man got out of the car, told the victim not to do anything stupid and to hand over the money.
The victim did so. The thieves told the man to walk and not look back or he would be shot. The victim walked until he saw a police officer on Penn.
Police also are looking for two men who forced their way into a West Side man’s home and robbed him of $100.
The 34-year-old Bouquet Avenue man told police a friend came to visit him about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. He opened the door for the friend, but two other men, brandishing guns, forced their way into the house.
The victim said one of the men put a gun to his head, and the second man went through his pockets taking the $100.
The friend and the men ran out of the house and fled in a black Buick Rendezvous.