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Mostly Cloudy Christmas crime wave
Three armed robberies in less than a week
Despite the bitter cold and intense snowstorms that Elmont and Franklin Square faced as the year ended, three armed robberies took place in five days in the area, two of them involving assaults.
Police were looking for one man in connection with all three robberies. A suspect associated with six other Nassau County robberies was arrested on Dec. 29, and police were investigating a possible connection, but as the Herald went to press they said they were not sure if they had their man.
Kalyn Jones, 18, of Roosevelt, was arrested in Hempstead after police stopped him for traffic violations. After finding a handgun under the front passenger seat of Jones’s car, police charged him with six additional robberies and are investigating his possible involvement in the three others.
“This fits the pattern that we had out in the county,” a Nassau County Police Department representative said. “Even though we haven’t charged anybody with these [three] robberies, there has been an arrest of a guy who has a similar M.O. This is a similar pattern, so it’s under investigation.”
The first local armed robbery occurred on Dec. 23 at 9:14 p.m. at the USA gas station on Meacham Avenue in Elmont. The station has been a popular target over the past year, most recently in October, when a clerk behind the counter grabbed a shotgun out of the hands of a would-be assailant and chased him out of the store with it.
On Dec. 23, however, it was a different story. Detectives said that a 6-foot-tall black man entered the gas station wearing a maroon sweatshirt and jeans, pointed a handgun at the two clerks on duty and then leapt over the counter and pistol-whipped one of them across the face.
The other clerk ran out and the suspect gave chase, catching the clerk and demanding the contents of his wallet, police reported. When the clerk gave the suspect $10, he opened fire with the gun, hitting the wall of the gas station. He then ran north on Meacham toward Scimitar Avenue.
The clerks called the police and an ambulance, and the injured clerk was taken to Franklin Hospital, where he was treated for a broken nose, a bruised eye orbit and lacerations to the face.
