A Case of Robbery of a Café

This is a true story of robbery and burglary of a cafe and this happened to your blogger. I write this to inform everybody of what had transpired and the present status of the case. Before anything else, let me state that one of the robbers was caught and that our café was not insured.

The robbery happened in April 6, 2007 (a Good Friday of Lent) at around 10:00 PM. In normal days, we have a man who sleeps in the shop  for its security but those days being the Lenten season, we allowed him to go on leave beginning Thursday night. We were closed on the following day, it being a holy day of obligation for us Christians.

The “bolt-cutter” gang striked right after the procession of Catholic devotees passed the shop. They parked a dark-blue colored van right infront of the shop’s door and cut-off the the electrical wire of perimeter light. Yes, they did use a bolt-cutter to destroy the hardened steel padlocks.

Our café was only about sixty (60) meters away from the barangay hall and some tanods were on-duty that night. They noticed and suspected something after the van parked but did not make any move yet. They want to make sure whether it was us (the owners, they knew us by the way) or somebody else who entered the shop’s premises. Their suspicion arose from the fact that the vehicle is not what we usually use.

Around five (5) minutes after the van parked, two (2) barangay tanods came near it but the driver immediately drove the vehicle and sped off making a sharp U-turn. It was at this instance that one of the robbers fell off the rear door of the van. The tanods chased the robber who fell off the van and speaking of coincidence, a SWAT Patrol car was in the area and the policemen in it helped in capturing the guy.

We live around five-minute drive away from our café and our shop tender who lives very near it immediately gave us a phone call. We were there in such a short notice and while the police were still chasing the robber. After they caught one of the robbers, we were told to follow them to the police station.

Before we could follow to the police station, the SOCO (Scene of the Crime Operative) Team arrived in our café and did their standard investigation procedures. It was at this time when we saw that only four (4) of the twenty (20) CPU units that we had got loaded to the van when the tanods came. However, the other sixteen (16) units were already stacked near the door, all done in a spsn of five (5) minutes since they parked the van. Another three (3) to five (5) minutes and we would have lost all of them to the bolt-cutter gang.

We arrived at the police station at around 2:00 AM of Saturday (Sabado de Gloria to Catholics) and surprise of all surprises, do you know who arrived in rescue of the robber? A coat-wearing lawyer (abogado de campanilla is how we call them in common parlance) presenting himself as a customer of the suspect who, he said, is the mechanic of his car. He said further that the wife of the suspect call him for help and so he is there at the police station for the bolt-cutter gang member who got caught.

This blog is now 597 words long and twice the usual lenght of my blogs here. Thank you very much for reading through it and watch for the continuation of this sad episode on the life of an uninsured café owner in my next post.