Saugerties police are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the man who robbed the Route 9W QuickChek at 7:06 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 23 while wearing a white ski mask.
The man, who also wore a hat, one glove, a blue jacket, a blue hood and blue jeans, police said, is an approximately 5’10” black man with sparse facial hair and a thin build. According to QuickChek employees, about $700 was stolen — no weapon was used. The individual was last seen walking down Route 9W.
“He reached behind [the counter], grabbed the entire till and walked out,” said a QuickChek employee who asked not to be named. “[The cashier] smacked the guy’s hand.”
Another employee said that the individual brought a container of doughnuts to the register to feign a purchase before telling the cashier that he was robbing the store, taking the till and absconding with the cash. No weapon was displayed during the incident.
The store was closed for less than two hours after the incident before reopening; although police dusted extensively for fingerprints, Police Chief Joe Sinagra said detectives can’t rely on this information to catch the thief — it takes weeks and sometimes months to receive fingerprinting results back from the labs that the samples are outsourced to. However, Sinagra said that the department already has “a number of leads” and that he is “extremely confident that we will solve this” before then, with the help of the public.
“[We] have informants that we speak to, we talk to people in neighborhoods … The public is our greatest partner in solving something like this — someone knows something,” he said on Monday. “It’s about getting someone with that information to come up to the plate.”
According to Sinagra, this is the first strong-arm robbery that has taken place in 2020; none took place in 2019 and two took place in 2018. Sinagra said investigators are reviewing the store’s security camera footage.
Saugerties detectives are asking individuals who live along Route 32 and 9W to submit their home security footage from that night if their cameras point out toward the roadways, or for individuals who may have seen something suspicious to contact police — “if they have something that is out of the ordinary, we’d like to see it.” All calls will be kept confidential, the chief promised.
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