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Foiling a Robbery
It was a warm afternoon in Kansas City, Missouri, but Kevin Croskey wasn’t bothered by the sweat trickling down his neck. After nearly four decades in the landscaping business, the rugged 53-year-old was used to working outdoors, lifting rocks, and planting fruit trees, rosebushes and ornamental grasses. Croskey usually didn’t even bother to turn on the air conditioning in his pickup as he drove from one job to the next.Last May 8, Croskey was running late, driving with his windows down to check on crews installing sprinklers and shrubs at the city’s IRS building. The light had just turned green at the intersection of Holmes and 75th streets when the lanky foreman spotted an old green Buick speeding through a red light. The car slammed into the vehicle in front of Croskey, then jumped the curb, hitting a pole and spinning to a stop in front of a gas station. Glass and metal flew everywhere.
Croskey made a quick turn into the gas station parking lot. Heading toward the Buick, he saw three young men climb out of the wreckage and take off. The guys weren’t hurt, he realized—they were up to no good. Nobody else seemed to notice. The other witnesses were focused on the elderly woman who’d been hit. Fortunately, she didn’t appear to be seriously injured.
Croskey followed the guys into a residential neighborhood, where they hid behind a garage. He could hear the whump whump whump of a police helicopter circling. “Over here!” he shouted, waving his arms. Seconds later, six officers surrounded the garage. The young men were suspected of robbing a Quiznos sandwich shop during the lunch rush. According to the police report, they forced the customers to lie on the floor as they pointed guns at the workers and told them to empty the cash registers. Then they stuffed about $600 into their pockets and fled, leaving several clerks in tears, too frightened to speak.
Croskey took a few deep breaths. Once the suspects had been taken into custody, he got back in his pickup and drove to work, his heart still racing. He had no idea his crime fighting had just begun.
Two weeks later, Croskey was helping his crew finish an irrigation system and plant trees at a new Starbucks. With the grand opening set for the next morning, the team had just 12 hours to do a job that would normally take three days. Shortly after sunrise, Croskey and the project manager, Joe Martin, had called in every available worker—more than a dozen in all. Now it was noon and the guys were hungry. “Pizza’s on me,” Martin told them.
The men had just sat down on the curb to cool off and eat when they heard pounding footsteps. Two teenagers were sprinting from the McDonald’s across the street. One kid was clutching a large denim handbag. Another man was running behind them, hollering, “Stop them! They stole a lady’s purse!”
As the pair tore through the crew’s immaculate new landscaping, the guys threw down their slices and chased them. “I was thinking, Man, here we go again,” says Croskey. “You see about everything working outside on the job. But two punk crimes in two weeks?”
Although the boys were quick, the landscapers were gaining on them. Years of lifting shovel-loads of dirt and hoisting 50-pound bags of mulch had kept the men in terrific shape. Martin, 42, was also a Boy Scout leader who loved to hike and swim. “Drop the purse and you can go home!” he yelled. The teens looked back but kept running.
David Brown, a 26-year-old laborer, circled around with several other guys to cut them off. Suddenly the younger teen threw down the purse and reached into the waistband of his jeans—like he was going to pull out a weapon.
Brown moved closer. “Dude,” he said, “you don’t want to fight all of us.” Martin pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911. Just then two off-duty police officers pulled over. The teen struggled to get away, but Brown held him until he was in handcuffs. Both were arrested.
“My identity, my address, my credit cards—it was all in there,” says the woman from McDonald’s, Debbie Cunningham. “If those kids had gotten away, my life would have been turned upside down.”
After the team appeared on the local news, “a woman drove by the work site and shouted, ‘Way to go, crime stoppers!’” says Brown. “That made us feel good.”
Still, Martin, who is often told he looks like Tom Selleck, albeit without hair, says he isn’t tempted to switch careers and paint Martin, PI on his door. “I’m proud of my crew, but I wouldn’t want to chase bad guys every day,” he says.
Croskey agrees. “I’ll stick to planting bushes.”
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