We seem to have a guy in our city making a bid for notoriety as a serial convenience store robber. The police released photos of him today, following his suspected seven robberies and one attempted robbery in the last nine days.
If you go to the link above, be sure to view the video. It appears the guy wasn’t ready in last night’s attempt for a clerk who decided she wasn’t going to put up with him robbing her store — she took a broom she was sweeping with and whacked the guy twice in the neck and head. He didn’t rob her store; he went down the road a few blocks, however, and robbed a different store. (We’ve got dozens of ‘em here in good old Springfield, MO.)
The moral to this story, however, would be this: PLEASE, if you are an overnight clerk working in any public place subject to robbery, DON’T follow this woman’s lead and resist. It isn’t worth it. Standard police advice here would be to always cooperate with the robber. That seems like a good idea to me. I’m sure that, for every humorous story of a clerk chasing away the bad guys with a broom, we could find more tragic stories of the bad guys injuring or killing the clerks.
It makes good video when it works, but too much of the time it turns out that someone gets killed or at least hurt over someone else’s money. That’s why convenience stores and other businesses carry insurance. Don’t get yourself killed over money, especially not someone else’s money.
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