SnapShot: They Came Out of the Shadows with Guns and Left with $50,000

Dawn breaks differently for those working the earliest shifts. For one 50-year-old bottle drop employee, a routine August morning in 2017 transformed into a nightmare when four masked gunmen surrounded her car at 4:45 AM. What followed was a meticulously executed heist that netted $50,000 in less than five minutes.

This episode takes you behind the scenes of a real detective investigation, revealing how modern robberies unfold and the challenges law enforcement faces in solving them. The detective walks us through the initial response, the frustrating lack of evidence, and the sophisticated investigative techniques employed—from cell tower data analysis to the cultivation of street informants. The reality? Those "burner phones" you see on crime shows are very real, and so are the relationships between detectives and their confidential sources.

Perhaps most fascinating is the psychology at play when the detective finally confronts the crew's leader—an "OG gangster" who willingly confesses to his own role while steadfastly refusing to implicate his accomplices. His apology letter to the traumatized victim offers a rare glimpse into the complex moral code that exists even among criminals. Meanwhile, the other three suspects vanish into the wind, highlighting the detective's sobering observation that "what you know and what you can prove are two different things." The case serves as a stark reminder that real-world crime solving rarely delivers the neat conclusions we see in entertainment. Listen now and gain a new perspective on the realities of criminal investigation, and why you should always watch your back, especially in those vulnerable early morning hours.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Armed Robbery at Bottle Drop
• 1:50 Limited Evidence and Investigation Begins
• 3:40 Cell Phones and Street Informants
• 5:30 Identifying Suspects and Confession
• 7:20 Case Outcome and Reflection

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, so here's a snapshot for you. This is August and about 2017, we'll say it's about 4.45 in the morning and there is a 50-year-old lady who is coming to work at a bottle drop in my city, arrives about 4.45, 4.50 in the morning, she pulls up into the parking lot Now the parking lot is well lit, but she pulls up and she pulls up right next to the employee entrance. Before she can get out of her car. Her car is surrounded by four masked men. They run up out of the darkness and the shadows. They all have guns, they have masks over their face and this is a robbery. Now, she doesn't have enough on her to steal, so they're not trying to steal from her. They take her out of the car as a hostage with a gun to her head, they walk her to the employee entrance, they open up the door and they go in to the safe. Now, when they get into the safe, they obviously had some inside information as to what they might find there. The young lady opens up the safe and there's the money. In just about three or four minutes of being inside the building, they were able to steal about $50,000 from the bottle drop location, and this is something that's normally kept there. The money is kept. It's wrapped up kind of like in shoebox-sized bundles and they were able to stuff these bundles into a duffel bag and out the door. But when they left they stole her car and they drove away in her car, and that is what we know. So she calls the police. The patrol officers respond and arrive. I get called as a detective and I end up taking this case because I'm the on-call detective for that week. So, in a nutshell, that is how this thing unfolded.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Now, when we're looking at the video, we don't have a lot to go on. We know that we're dealing with some either Hispanic or tan white males and we're dealing with two black males. One of the black males is larger in stature than the rest. Everybody else is kind of average height and weight. We have a description of their clothes. We know what they're wearing because of the video cameras from inside the location, but that is really all we have.

Speaker 1: 2:18

When we interview the lady, we get no indication. This is an inside job. The victim is presenting and she is scared, she's upset, she's crying, she's talking about quitting, she's talking about how they've she's told the company numerous times that security needs to be improved. She can't believe she almost died. She is giving all. She is not involved in this. So that's pretty obvious right off the bat.

Speaker 1: 2:43

But then we have to start taking a look at. You know how do we investigate this? And we invested, we started investigating by doing a neighborhood canvas. We're taking a look at video cameras from around the area. We see some people walking in on foot it's about four in the morning. We see a couple of cars drive by. So we have maybe they're involved, maybe they're not. We see some of these people walking through the neighborhoods and coming in. It looks like they're coming in from all different directions to meet and congregate here. At the bottle drop no-transcript, everybody was gloved up, went out and tried to get some footprints no footprint impressions.

Speaker 1: 3:39

So now we got to start looking at a couple of things. We got to start looking at electronics being cell phones, that type of stuff and we have to start looking out to our informants on the street. Does anybody have any information for us? So when we start looking at the cell phone stuff, we start doing some cell phone tower data analysis and we find you know, it's four o'clock in the morning, right? So we find that some cell phones came into that area about four o'clock in the morning and we have three cell phone numbers, I believe the fourth one didn't have one. So we find these cell phone numbers, but they're all burner phones. So burner phones, meaning that these are disposable phones that people buy over the counter at 7-Eleven and then throw them away when they're done. So there's no real subscriber information attached to them. And it's about maintaining relationships with people on the street, having people that will talk to you and having people that owe you something. And if they owe you something because you've done them a favor, quid pro quo, whatever it may be, guess what? Guys, ladies and gentlemen, it really exists. So we start talking to them and, before you know it, some people are starting to feed us a little bit of information about hey, you may want to look in this general area.

Speaker 1: 4:57

So, as the investigation continues to develop, we look into that area and we find that one of the burner phone numbers was actually in the cell phone log of a suspect that we arrested for some drug dealing. So we start chasing that down and, before you know it, we're able to identify one of the suspects. After identifying that suspect, we're able to take a look at some of his known associates and we're able to identify a second suspect. So now we have two out of four suspects that have identified. But just because we've identified them doesn't mean we can do anything with them, because we have no physical proof, we have no evidence, we have no fingerprints, we have burner cell phones that they can have a defense for. So we have to start looking at how we're going to tie them into it and at the end of the day we put up surveillance cameras and pull cameras on their houses and all this other stuff.

Speaker 1: 5:42

But at the end of the day it really came down to just going and talking to them. So one of the suspects got arrested, the bigger guy, the guy that was in charge. He got arrested on some other case and I went out to the jail to talk to him and at first he wasn't going to say a whole lot to me. He didn't know what I was talking about. Then he wanted some of that quid pro quo and he wanted maybe some time off of his current sentence. So we started talking and before you know it he admitted to everything that he did in that case.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Now this guy is an OG gangster. He's been around the block a time or twice and I've got to respect the ones that will take ownership for what they did. But they don't want to give up any of their buddies. They're not going to tell anything else. So he gives me everything that he did, admits to it, writes an apology letter to the victim I was never going to hurt you, I was never going to kill you, I just wanted the money, all of this stuff. He ultimately gets prosecuted for the robbery, but he wouldn't give up his other three suspects.

Speaker 1: 6:47

We did a ton of investigation for those other three suspects but at the end of the day couldn't come up with anything concrete and oftentimes in law enforcement what you know and what you can prove are two different things. So that's where we ended up with those other people. So when this whole thing shook out, the bottle drop was down about $50,000. The lady who was the victim in this case didn't quit. She continued to work in these unsecure conditions. She needed the money.

Speaker 1: 7:12

We were able to prosecute the OG for it because he admitted to everything that he did and he gave us information that we wouldn't have it. Because he admitted to everything that he did and he gave us information that we wouldn't have known, or he corroborated information that we did know, like how they approached the building, et cetera. But the other three guys we never found. So, uh, you know, they're out there in the wind somewhere, probably done it again, but it's not going to be to have lack of trying, it's just because, uh, you know, this time the stars didn't align. So the bottle drop robbery. We see this stuff on TV. We think it doesn't happen, totally happens. Always be watching your back, and that's it. So there's the Murderous Music Snapshot.