“Nobody move! Gimme all the money!”
This incident occurred on December 21, 2011 when I was party to an armed robbery at a US Post Office in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
To set the stage, I was working as a defense contractor in the Washington, DC area between overseas deployments. I decided to use my lunch break to send care packages to my mother who was in the Peace Corps in Uganda, Africa at the time.
THE ROBBERY
It’s early afternoon, four days before Christmas, and I’m standing in line at the post office filling out the multiple customs forms for my mom’s birthday and Christmas presents. There are about 7 other customers, plus the couple of postal clerks are in the back.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught the commotion in the entrance near the P.O. boxes… Just early enough to not be caught off guard when this dude rolls in.
“Nobody move! Gimme all the money!”
He’s a black male, 5’7″–5’9″, 150–170lbs. Black hoodie and black bandana covering all but his eyes. In his right hand is a Kel-Tec P3AT (or Ruger LCP or similar) .380 auto with a black frame and stainless slide.
He’s focused on the counter, not the customers. I’m standing behind the middle counter (where you fill out paperwork while standing in line) keeping a low profile.
“Get out here! Gimme the money!” He’s pacing back and forth. Banging on the counter. Shouting for the postal clerks to come out and give him the money. They were all in the back when he came in and were not coming out, preferring to leave their customers to fend for themselves.
“Where are they?” he keeps asking the rest of us every few seconds. Nobody’s saying anything.
The robber doesn’t look high, but he is clearly nervous. He is constantly looking around, mostly checking outside to look for police, but has no real situational awareness.
After 15-30 seconds of pacing the length of the counter and yelling for the clerks, he turns to the customers. “Everybody gimme your money!”
He’s still all over the place — looking around, looking outside, not focused on any one thing or person — as folks are fumbling with wallets, keys, phones, etc.
“Empty your pockets” he yells at nobody in particular, still pacing back and forth.
There’s no way he’s getting the access cards, government ID’s, lock picks, handcuff key, or knife I have on me. The last thing anybody needs is some thuglet or his friends gaining access to sensitive installations around the DC area or additional tools or weapons. So I pull out my wallet and remove the cash and CAC (Common Access Card; the standard military and government ID).
I put the cash in plain view on the counter. The CAC goes back in my pocket with the other access cards. I stash my wallet underneath my iPhone and slide it behind the box for my mom. It’s still on the counter (no need to get caught “hiding” something), but not exactly handed to him on a silver platter. I loosen my tucked-in shirt and hang my arms to cover the Emerson CQC-7 hidden in my waistband and the credentials in my pockets.
THE GETAWAY
Still unfocused and nervous, the robber ends up knocking a bunch of stuff around the Post Office. He snags about $100 from me (the cash I put on the counter), a few hundred from other folks, two guys’ wallets, and drops a woman’s wallet on the floor. Too nervous to notice anything else, he runs outside and disappears behind the apartment complex across the street.
THE AFTERMATH
Only after he’s gone do the customers start losing it.
A few folks just run away, not waiting for the cops to show up.
One guy, a corrections officer, starts getting irate. He’s banging on stuff, yelling for the postal clerks to come out, and generally making an ass out of himself.
Almost everybody was either yelling, screaming, or crying. Sometimes all at once.
I was the only one to call 911. It rang 10+ times before they answered. I had to tell everybody to quiet down multiple times just so the call-taker could hear me.
It took 10+ minutes for the cops to arrive. Then they talked to the postal clerks in the back for a while before ever coming up front. Thus began 2+ hours of the cops taking statements that run the gamut from worthless freakouts (“Oh my god, it was so scary, he had a huge gun, blah blah”) to the completely inconclusive (“Ma’am, was he white, black, Hispanic?” “Oh I don’t know”).
None of the statements I could see or overhear were even remotely close to being an accurate description of the events or the perpetrator. Descriptions of what he looked like were wrong. The most common theme: he was described as being much bigger, taller, heavier than he actually was. Depictions of the gun were wrong; again, it was universally described as being much bigger than it was. Descriptions of his movements were wrong. Etc.
As I’m giving my statement, the cops vary between treating me with suspicion for being able to properly ID the gun he had to approving nods as they ask “How do you know that? Are you a cop? What do you do for a living?”.
After the statements were given, the remaining customers were allowed to conduct their business at the post office. The post office ended up shipping my packages for free, which meant that even with the money I lost, I still came out $80 ahead.
THINKING THROUGH THE PROBLEMS:
BE A HERO, OR PLAY IT COOL?
I know some of you, like me, like to think “well, if that ever happens to me I’ll just [draw my CCW/use my Muay Thai/Jedi light-saber] their ass and it’ll be all good.” In some cases that may be the correct course of action. But not always. Probably not even usually.
If it’s a one-on-one situation in a relatively private environment, hey, knock yourself out.
But in a crowded environment, where one screw-up could lead to you or somebody else getting killed, you might need to swallow your pride and give some thug a bit of change.
This time, the bad guy was all over the place. He wasn’t paying attention to what was going on and was generally making an easy target of himself. But one wrong move could push somebody who is already nervous over the edge and turn a bad situation into a fatal one. I’m not willing to take that gamble with somebody else’s life unless it’s absolutely necessary.
The flip side of this is that because the dude was all over the place and more worried about looking for possible cops outside the post office than paying attention to the customers inside, it would have been easy to gain a tactical advantage. There were a ton of opportunities that could have been used — had any of us been armed — to draw on the guy and put him down. We’ll leave the legal justification for shooting somebody outright for another conversation, but if you were ready to pull the trigger, this guy gave ample opportunity.
Of course, none of us in the Post Office were armed. The State of Maryland and the USPS do not feel that law-abiding citizens have the right to protect themselves. Because of that, the best course of action at the time and with the resources available was to play it cool, gather as much information as possible, be ready to take action if things changed, and hope for the best.
TAKEAWAYS:
Situational Awareness is key. I should never have stopped in PG County in the first place. I simply Google Mapped the closest post office and headed there. Had I been paying attention when I walked in, I would have seen the notice on the front door with the “have you seen this man” picture of the guy who robbed the same post office just a few months prior to this robbery, but I didn’t.
Throughout the robbery I was calm and collected, but not as on top of things as I should have been. From what I could tell, I was the only person there able to give a mostly-coherent statement of events and description of the robber. But as good as that was, I should have done better.
Let’s look at the overall scene: a young black man, in a black neighborhood in an urban environment, wearing a black hoodie and black jeans, with his face obscured, committed an armed robbery. How would this guy possibly be identified? As good as my description was, it wasn’t perfect.
- Was he wearing gloves or not? I didn’t think he was, but other witnesses said he was, so I might just not remember for sure.
- I didn’t note exactly where/what he touched to narrow down where to dust for prints if necessary.
- What kind of shoes he was wearing? Was his hoodie was a a zip-up or pullover? Did it have the kangaroo pocket at the bottom?
Small details like that matter. They’re the distinctions that make the difference when the robber was otherwise wearing the uniform of the day for young men all over that neighborhood. I wasn’t on the ball.
In a similar vein, pay attention to what else is going on. Just because there’s one dude with a gun doesn’t mean that somebody else won’t do something stupid.
There were two other customers that looked poised to get the rest of us shot: large men with offensive postures, angry, looking like they want to start a fight. Luckily nothing happened, but keep your head on a swivel and be prepared to act (or just get out of Dodge) if something changes.
This is just one minor example of the kinds of things that happen every day, all over the world. Situations will vary, but pay attention, use your head, and use your skills to make the best out of any situation you find yourself in.