Police have lead in purse-snatching case

Thanks to the intervention of three men and the victim herself, police have a solid lead in the strong-armed robbery of a Japanese student at a Shadle-area bus stop.

The victim – one of four Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute students waiting for a bus – was bruised and scraped when a purse snatcher jerked her onto the sidewalk across Wellesley Avenue from the Shadle Park Wal-Mart store.

The victim was about to follow three other Mukogawa students onto a bus about 5:30 p.m. May 25 when one of two men yanked violently on a handbag that was secured diagonally across her shoulders, causing her to fall.

Court documents say the victim followed the robber and his accomplice as they ran north between houses.

They apparently didn’t realize the victim followed them and was about a block away when they stopped in the backyard of a home in the 2400 block of West Broad Avenue.

The student told police she watched the men examine the contents of her purse.

She became frightened and went back to the bus stop and later returned to the alley behind the house on West Broad with one of her friends.

Tom Winkenweder, who lives near the bus stop, let the other two students use his telephone and accompanied them to the house where the victim saw the suspects rifling her bag.

“I had kind of a little bit of trouble trying to understand them,” Winkenweder said Friday. “They were just almost in tears. … To have that happen to them, it’s too bad.”

Winkenweder said the victim thought the suspects had gone inside the house.

She knocked on the door, but a woman came out instead.

The woman claimed she didn’t know the two men who had run into her house, but she refused to ask them to come outside, according to court documents.

By this time, two men who had witnessed the robbery and followed the suspects in their construction company pickup joined Winkenweder and the Mukogawa students in confronting the woman, Detective Kip Hollenbeck said in a court affidavit.

Winkenweder said he went to the back of the house in time to see two men who appeared to be in their early 20s – one white, one black – run out of the house and out of a detached garage.

“They were on a dead run and, man, I was right on their butts,” the 43-year-old Winkenweder said. “I almost had the white guy, but then the black dude pulled out a knife and so I backed off.”

He said the black man “slashed” the knife at him at a distance of four or five feet. “It was like a little pocketknife,” Winkenweder said. “It wasn’t that big, but it was big enough for me.”

Although out of the chase himself, Winkenweder yelled to the men in the construction truck, and they pursued the suspects with their vehicle.

Hollenbeck said in his affidavit that the men followed the suspects to a house in the 2200 block of West Queen Avenue.

The men returned and gave the address to the students, and then left without identifying themselves.

Police later appealed for the men, as well as a skateboarder who also tried to help the students, to contact detectives.

Hollenbeck said in a search warrant application that he went to the address on West Queen, where a resident acknowledged that the black suspect’s description matched his 18-year-old son.

The detective got a warrant to search the Broad Avenue home where the suspects were seen. Court records show three disposable cameras were seized.

A disposable camera was one of the items stolen from the exchange student.

Other items included a credit card, identification cards, traveler’s checks and a small amount of cash.

“They just blatantly ran up on a summer day and just grabbed from those girls because they were innocent looking,” Winkenweder said. “… I don’t want that stuff to happen in our neighborhood.

“Hopefully, they’ll catch them.”