Two armed robbers walked into a Virginia Beach 7-Eleven at around 2am, but they didn’t walk out, thanks to a man who was carrying:
PILOT ONLINE – When the chaos began at 2:10 a.m., [Barrie] Engel, who owns Coastal Cafe down the street, was waiting with her friend near the cash register. The store was nearly empty.
“Two gentlemen — armed, masked, robbers — came in the store with their guns up and told us to stay where we were, nobody move,” she said.
“I did exactly that, I pretty much froze and looked at my friend and he looked at me, wondering, ‘Is this really happening? Is this real?’ ”
It was real.
One of the masked men stayed near the door while the other went behind the counter and started putting money in his pockets, Engel said.
“I was looking right at him (the robber) and then I looked at the clerk, and the clerk raised his hands and said ‘Come on, man, don’t do this.’ And not sooner than he said that, I heard a gunshot and as soon as I heard the gunshot, I dropped down to the ground and put my hands over my head and started praying because I thought the guy shot the clerk,” she said.
“After that shot it was like three shots, bam, then bam bam. It could have been two, two or three.”
Engel and her friend looked at each other, and then she saw the man standing beside them. He said to her, “Nobody’s gonna point a gun at me and get away with it.” That’s when she realized he was the one who fired.
As she surveyed the gruesome scene around her, Engel saw one masked man lying on the floor, dead, and the other behind the counter asking for help after having been being seriously injured. “I was shaking in my boots,” she said.
Not long after, police showed up.
Police believe the two men have been robbing other 7-Elevens in the area.
But they haven’t said if they are going to charge the man who shot the armed robbers:
Police have not said whether they’ll charge the bystander. Charges are pending against the men in custody — both the one who was shot and another police found nearby and said they believe was involved.
The names of the man who died and the one injured have not yet been released by police. The shooter’s name will only be released if he is charged, police said.
I wasn’t there, but from the sound of it, the man who did the shooting was a hero.
It doesn’t matter that these thieves hadn’t killed anyone else at other locations they’d robbed. Once you pull a gun on someone, their lives are under threat and they have the right to fight back. There was no way for this hero to know the outcome of the robbery. And shooting them was the right thing to do.