Robberies targeting food deliveries on the rise

Something didn’t look right when Chris Capps arrived at the fourplex to deliver four Jimmy John’s sandwiches late one night in early June.

The porch light wasn’t on, and there were no lights on inside the apartment near Lincoln and Oliver. He was digging out his cellphone to call the customer’s number when two strangers emerged from the darkness and demanded his wallet.

At first he thought they were kidding.

“Then they said it again and added, ‘Are we going to have to blast this fool?’” Capps said. “I realized they weren’t joking.”

The two men took Capps’ wallet as well as cash he had in his pocket and left. The case, which remains unsolved, is one of eight robberies targeting drivers delivering food around Wichita in the first half of the year.

That compares to 11 in all of 2014 and 14 in 2013, according to statistics provided by the Wichita Police Department.

While no serious injuries have been reported with this year’s cases, one man was clubbed with a baseball bat and another robber fired a shot during a recent hold-up. A review of most of the cases showed they occurred after 6 p.m. and often late in the evening.

Most of the victims have been delivering pizza, but there’s no real trend emerging from the locations of the robberies. The suspects are commonly described to be in their teens or early 20s.

Lt. James Espinoza said police so far haven’t identified what may be driving the increase. They appear to be crimes of opportunity, he said.

This year’s increase prompted Wichita police to discuss safety precautions recently.

Drivers should be “very wary about their surroundings,” Espinoza said. “If it doesn’t feel right to the driver, they should drive around” to check the area.

Casey Lawrence, who delivers pizzas for Marco’s Pizza, said the company recommends safety measures that he considers “common sense.”

Drivers are encouraged to park in well-lighted areas at night. If the caller ID doesn’t show a number, “we take extra care to make sure it’s an actual address.”

“Especially at night, we try to make sure they leave a porch light on,” Lawrence said.

That not only makes the location easier to find, it shows someone is home. Lawrence said he has been delivering pizzas for 18 months now, and he hasn’t had any problems.

The pizza restaurant on West Central delivers in a geographic area stretching from Broadway to Tyler and from Pawnee to 29th Street North.

“We go everywhere that’s in our delivery area,” Lawrence said. “We really haven’t had any issues.”

Tracy Egan, a shift supervisor for Jimmy John’s, said people sometimes call in fake addresses or use fake names. They’ve even used burner cellphones – cheap, disposable prepaid cellphones that can be difficult to track.

“If it’s a regular customer, we can trust them,” Egan said. “If they sound a little shady on the phone, we make sure the driver doesn’t have more than $20 on them at any given time.”

After he was robbed, Capps said, there was some talk about not delivering to that part of Wichita for safety reasons. But that step hasn’t been taken.

Egan said it’s difficult to judge an order based simply on the how the caller is acting on the phone.

“Some people, they’re new customers and they’re not exactly sure” how to place an order, Egan said. “Sometimes, people sound like they’re really shady, and you get there and they’re perfectly fine.”

Capps said he still remembers “everything” about the night he was robbed, including that he was surprised they didn’t take the sandwiches he had with him. Instead, they just kicked them over.

“It ended up being an ‘X marks the spot’ for the police officers to see where it all happened,” Capps said.

While the suspects – whom Capps guessed to be no more than 20 years old – threatened more than once to shoot him, he never actually saw a weapon.

“For all I know, they didn’t even have guns,” he says now. “I wasn’t risking that. … I’m not that brave.”

Capps said he only works daytime shifts now.

“I like that more anyway,” he said.

The increase in robberies targeting food deliverers doesn’t surprise a local woman who said she has been delivering pizzas for 30 years. She said she didn’t want her name used because of safety concerns.

“It’s worse now” than several years ago, she said. “I think a lot of it has to do with the economy.”

She said she has been robbed several times over the years, but she keeps delivering pizzas because she needs the money and she enjoys meeting people.

“You gotta do what you gotta do,” she said.

This story was originally published July 3, 2015 at 6:56 AM with the headline "Robberies targeting food deliveries on the rise."