Robbers hit Wichita stores day and night

A woman was working the counter of a tiny restaurant around 9 one recent night when a masked robber stepped up and pointed a handgun at her from a few feet away.

Recalling it, she pressed her palms to the sides of her head and cringed. She shook her head and began to cry. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

Her experience is part of a Wichita crime trend in which anyone could be a victim – or a witness.

Robberies of businesses have steadily increased since 2012, according to Wichita Police Department data.

Robbers, sometimes working in teams, are hitting Wichita businesses day and night, citywide.

Often holding guns or maybe a knife, they rob customers in fast-food lobbies and discount stores, demand patrons’ cellphones, grab employees and threaten to hurt them and order workers to the floor.

Just this past Sunday, a 24-year-old parolee with his 3-year-old son waiting in the car ripped out a convenience store cash drawer, led officers on a dramatic chase through a neighborhood and tried to carjack two different motorists before a sergeant shot him, police said.

Robbers usually get a small return for the risk of years in prison, experts say.

Yet the number of Wichita business robberies has grown: from 70 in 2012, to 104 in 2013, 116 in 2014 and 136 in 2015. The number nearly doubled in those four years.

So far this year, through Monday, the number stood at 118. That’s on a pace to exceed last year’s total. The tallies of business robberies, which police call “commercial robberies,” exclude bank robberies.

Nationwide, since 1995, robberies have steadily fallen, FBI data shows. The federal data includes all kinds of robberies, not just business robberies.

Gordon Ramsay, who is in his first year as Wichita police chief, said he noticed the increase in business robberies before he started his job. After he arrived, he said in an e-mail Tuesday, he had his staff put together a “commercial robbery reduction plan … focused on the repeat offenders that we believe are responsible for the majority of the commercial robberies. We have made a number of arrests of the serial robbers. Unfortunately, others have stepped into their place.”

Ramsay said his department’s investigators have teamed with the FBI and ATF “and are aggressively investigating and tracking our suspects.”

Authorities have provided advice to potential victims on “target hardening and are expanding it citywide,” he said. The advice includes: limiting the amount of cash on hand; using video cameras and alarm systems; following “crime prevention through environmental design”; and considering having more than one employee working at all times.

“We believe the robberies are the result of a relatively few groups and individuals,” Ramsay said.

One example: Last month, prosecutors charged Christopher McColm with using a handgun to rob or try to rob four different convenience or fast-food stores around the city in just two days. McColm has pleaded guilty and is being held on a $200,000 bond.

His crimes were “fueled by his drug addiction,” and he has no previous felony convictions, his defense attorney said in a court document. According to an investigator’s affidavit, McColm said he was spending money daily on methamphetamine and that “bills were piling up” after he lost his job.

During one of his crimes, he left without money after an employee at the cash register began crying “and said she was afraid,” the affidavit said. Witnesses’ descriptions helped solve the cases.

Police department spokeswoman Sgt. Nikki Woodrow said the robberies are an issue for the whole community, and “we need to work together to solve these types of crime.” Woodrow said people can help by being good witnesses and providing tips, to investigators at 316-268-4407, or anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 316-267-2111.

The police department’s clearance rate for solving business robberies has dropped from 46 percent in 2012 to 33 percent in 2015. Clearance usually means that charges have been filed. Still, the Wichita clearance rate remains above the national average, said police Capt. Jeff Weible.

As with Ramsay, Weible noted that police have focused on robbery investigations since the end of last year and have tied some suspects to multiple robberies.

Detectives and officers on the streets have been working closely, and the department has used media and “special assignments” to help identify suspects, Weible said.

A 2015 robbery at an AT&T store in Derby, just southeast of Wichita, showed how dangerous robberies can be. Sixty-one-year-old Julie Dombo went into the store that day to get her cellphone fixed, and a robber shot her twice. Her injuries were so severe that her hands and feet were amputated.

Increase no surprise

Richard Wright, a Georgia State University criminology professor who has interviewed robbers who target people on the street, said he is not surprised that business robberies are rising in Wichita and elsewhere.

Wright’s theory: Around 1997, states began to put welfare payments on cards. The result: less cash in pockets, fewer targets for robbers. So the robber who used to hold up a person on a sidewalk has shifted to targeting businesses that deal in cash.

The more urban the business location, the more likely it is to deal in cash, because customers there generally don’t have debit or credit cards, Wright said.

Andrew Hochstetler, an Iowa State University professor and criminologist who has studied how criminals make decisions, articulates the same basic argument as Wright: It’s possible that robbers are turning more and more to striking legitimate businesses because they “can’t get enough money on the street” because people don’t carry as much cash and because open-air drug markets are disappearing. In the past, a robber might have easily found a victim with $200 in his pocket.

How robbers tick

There is a psychology to robbery.

Robbery by definition is a brazen, violent crime with low returns, Hochstetler said.

Many robbers are emotionally volatile and dangerous, he said.

“One reason we say, ‘Always comply with robbers’ is because they are not typical offenders. They have … temper issues. They’re the kind of people who say, ‘I lose my mind completely when people confront me.’ ”

There is a key distinction between burglars, who break into homes but almost always want to avoid confrontation, and robbers, he said.

Under state law, robbery involves taking something forcefully in the presence of another person.

Robbers “want you to feel like your life is in danger,” Hochstetler said. “A lot of them will go ahead and strike you, just to make that point.”

Wright, the Georgia State criminologist, said robbers try to “create the illusion of death” even though they don’t intend to kill people in most cases.

But the fear that robbers create also raises the chance of what Wright calls a “fateful misreading”: victims who resist because they think they are going to be killed – even though the robber doesn’t want to go that far – or victims who freeze because they’re “too terrified to comply.”

Another striking thing about robbers, District Attorney Marc Bennett said, is the risk that robbers take “is just phenomenal: You walk into a convenience store where there are people coming and going constantly,” where videos are capturing every angle.

“And for people to say, ‘I’m going to bring a gun and go in there’ has to be an act of desperation.”

Recent cases

Recent examples of Wichita business robberies:

▪ Around 7 p.m. Aug. 18, a robber went into the Family Dollar store, 370 E. 13th St., grabbed a clerk by her shirt and said, “Give me the money or I will hurt you!” while holding a knife, records show. The robber’s haul: $86.83.

In that crime, Sedgwick County prosecutors have charged Stevie Reed, 43, with aggravated robbery. His fingerprint tied him to the crime, an affidavit said. Reed also is charged with other crimes, including theft from a Dollar General on Aug. 5.

Reed wrote in a recent court record that he has been unemployed for two years. He stopped reporting to his parole officer about a month before he was accused of the Family Dollar robbery. He has a robbery conviction from about 10 years ago and a string of burglary and theft convictions dating back to 1991.

▪ On Aug. 15, a gunman robbed the Burger King, 418 S. West St. The crime also involved kidnapping, because one victim was held or confined, according to court records. The man who pleaded guilty to the crime, Jealani Alley, now 25, had been recently fired from the Burger King when he robbed it after another employee propped open a door, giving him access, according to a court document filed by his defense attorney.

At the time of the robbery, Alley had been released from prison and was under parole supervision, after being convicted of attempted aggravated robbery for a 2011 crime.

After the 2015 robbery, the defense attorney contended that Alley was drawn into a scheme to rob the Burger King by the other employee and that “if he had not been approached by (the other employee) while he was in a manic state, he would not have considered participating in an armed robbery.” When Alley was younger, in foster care, he was diagnosed with a personality disorder, his attorney said.

Alley received a seven-year prison sentence.

▪ And in one of the most recent robberies, around 5 p.m. Sunday, a man paid for gasoline at Johnson’s General Store, 53rd and Meridian. But then he grabbed a cash register and carried it out to a car where his 3-year-old son and the man’s mother were, police said. She tried to stop her son, but he led police on a dramatic car and foot chase through a neighborhood before he got out and tried to carjack two vehicles at 29th and Arkansas, police said.

The robber managed to jump into the back seat of one car at the intersection. A police sergeant, thinking the suspect was armed and posed a danger to two people in the car, fired multiple shots, critically wounding the man, the police chief told reporters. Ramsay said the suspect is a documented gang member.

The Kansas Department of Corrections confirmed that the man shot and captured in the Johnson’s General Store robbery is Andrew Villa, a parolee released from prison on Aug. 19. Villa has a lengthy list of convictions, including criminal possession of a firearm, records show.

In that robbery, Ramsay said a witness followed the suspect and relayed information so police could catch him.

What you can do

Weible, the police captain, said that most times robbers want to get in and out of a business as fast as they can.

What should you do if you are an employee or customer being robbed?

Call 911 as soon as it is safe to call, he said.

Although the experience is stressful, Weible said, try to stay calm and remember as many details as you can. Such as: What hand did the robber use when taking the money? How tall was he? His weight?

“And any other unique descriptors that you can share.”

Some considerations

One consolation for customers is that the probability of being at a business when it is robbed is pretty low, said John McCluskey, a criminal justice professor with the Rochester Institute of Technology.

McCluskey has studied the interaction between robbers and victims. Among his findings and thoughts:

▪ Robbers want victims to comply, so resisting is the wrong approach.

▪ Robbers rarely get much money.

▪ Robbers go where they think they are more apt to get cash, so businesses that deal in cash are vulnerable and should limit how much cash they have on hand. People tend to use more cash at fast-food businesses, for example.

▪ National stores tend to have the same layout and practices. Once a robber gets familiar with the format, he will often hit the same type of business repeatedly because of his familiarity.

▪ Many robbers “develop a script, and that’s the script … they follow.”

If it works, they keep doing it.

This story was originally published September 24, 2016 at 8:01 PM with the headline "Robbers hit Wichita stores day and night."