Boise Crime and the Holiday Season
Two Days of Robberies: Boise Police Report 3; Garden City, Meridian 1 Each
By J. Gelband, 12-19-07
Something crime-inducing is in the water in the Boise area. Or maybe it’s just that people are panicky about not having enough dough this holiday season but the Boise Police Department has a lot of work on their hands this week.
The BPD issued three reports of robberies in the last two days. Garden City and Meridian each had one.
First there is the story about the bank robber who held up the US Bank on Vista at 9:43 this morning. Police reported that the suspect left behind a suspicious device that had antennae on it. The Boise Police Bomb Squad arrived on scene to inspect the device, which was determined to be non-explosive but made to look like a potentially viable device. Officers used a robot to remove the device and detonate it in the parking lot as a precautionary measure.
Police are searching for the suspect they describe as white male, possibly in his late 40’s, and last seen wearing a fake grey beard and mustache and wide rimmed dark glasses – which, you know, he’s probably still wearing.
BPD is also investigating a report of a robbery in the parking lot of an East Boise shopping center at 5:15 p.m. Officers responded to a call from a man who says he was held up in a parking lot on Broadway. The victim says he was walking to his car and approached by two men who asked for directions. When the men got closer, one pulled out what looked like a handgun and demanded the victim’s wallet.
The suspects, who are males in their 20s, drove off in a silver Volkswagen Jetta with a smoke-colored cover on the license plate.
And earlier, just before midnight yesterday, a man about 20 years old robbed the 7-Eleven on Broadway Avenue downtown. The white male also showed a handgun and demanded a pack of smokes from the clerk. That’s all he got.
Then there’s the story about the woman who robbed a Garden City Big Smoke yesterday. She brandished a handgun but the surveillance video has a nice, clear picture of the bespectacled woman in her early 20s. Check out her picture on the police web site or the KTVB web site and call the cops if you recognize her.
That makes three unsolved robberies for the Boise Police Department and one for the Garden City Police, but the Meridian police are faring a bit better after having caught James V. Hernandez, 23, of Nampa and Beatrice Ruiz, 19, of Caldwell after the duo robbed a Meridian Radio Shack early Wednesday morning.
The break in activated an alarm that alerted police who arrived on the scene to catch the buglers driving off in a van full of video games, satellite radios and GPS units.
Don’t rob any place or anyone, if you’re feeling a hankering. The moral of the story isn’t that people aren’t getting caught; it’s that Boiseans are getting annoyed at all the thuggery.
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