Sheriff’s deputies arrested a band of men Friday morning connected with a series of robbery-assaults in Kitsap County.
According to sheriff’s reports, the perpetrators are accused of first demanding money and then attacking their victims when the victims refuse to hand over the cash.
The first incident occurred Aug. 17 when the men, all in their late teens to early 20s, offered to take the 28-year-old male victim from a local Port Orchard sports bar to a so-called “party” in the Olalla area. The robbers then drove the victim to a remote residence, walked up a dirt roadway and demanded money from the man. When the man refused one of the robbers punched him in the face, fracturing his jaw, and then allegedly stole more than $700 cash and property from the victim.
The second incident occurred at 3:24 a.m on Aug. 24 when one of the men attempted to rob the ARCO AM/PM convenience store early outside Port Orchard city limits. The assailant went into the store wearing a black mask and a bright red zipped up jacket, with a hood pulled over his head.
He demanded money and hit the 63-year-old clerk in the head with the butt of his handgun when the clerk refused to turn over the cash.
Kitsap County Sheriff’s detectives working jointly on the separate robbery cases later that morning on Aug. 24 briefed a patrol sergeant that a red, 1996 Dodge Dakota they identified in the surveillance video of the attempted robbery/assault at the gas station looked similar to the vehicle described by the victim who was robbed a week earlier in Olalla.
The patrol sergeant then stopped and apprehended the suspects traveling in the red truck at 7:55 a.m. at the intersection of Pioneer Lane Southeast and Karcher Road Southeast after spotting the vehicle traveling northbound on Jackson Avenue Southeast.
“The sergeant ran the license plate, looked inside and found that the red jacket, the hood, the black mask were in the truck,” said Kitsap County Sheriffs’ Deputy Scott Wilson. “Deputies waited and got a search warrant. The items were in plane view. It was really fortunate that the sergeant was sitting there doing paper work on Jackson Avenue. We were in the right place at the right time. The guy who hit the clerk with the butt of his gun was also involved in the robbery and assault in Olalla.
“When you have perpetrators that commit crimes — burglaries, thefts, you find that it does occur frequently that law enforcement links them together to multiple crimes — not just the one that they are caught at, but previous crimes using evidence and witnesses.”
All three men are being held on multiple counts of robbery and assault and one for possession of methamphetamine. Bail is set at $500,000 for one individual, and $1 million and $150,000 for the other two robbery suspects.
