Employees Fight Off Would-Be Robber
BROOKLYN, Md. (WJZ) -- A gunman stormed a local pizza shop trying to rob it, but he ended up getting more than he bargained for. Kelly McPherson has more.
The store owner says that business has been slow lately and he just couldn't financially handle another robbery. That determination is pretty clear from all angles of his surveillance video.
Around closing time, a man walked into Pizza Boli's. The owner was there, working near the oven that night.
"While he was walking, I had suspicions that he was doing something. Meanwhile, he pulled a gun and said, `I'm not playing,'" said owner Choudhry Younis. "I said, `I'm not playing, either.'"
And he attacked the would-be robber, chasing him all the way to the door. Several secuirt cameras captured no hesitation from the man who's owned this Brooklyn Park shop for eight years. He grabbed the only thing he had: a metal spatula.
"I'm not going to give him my hard-earned money like this, so I just took my chances and I hit him," Younis said. "He got distracted with my other employee and I had a minute so I just banged it, once, twice, and then he dropped the gun."
Two weeks ago, a robber came into the same shop from the back and got money out of the cash register and off of an employee--but not this time.
"As he was running, I just threw this behind him and hit him in the back," Younis said.
Younis and his employee held 21-year-old Mark Ensinger down on the ground. Outside was an accomplice, Heather Horton, who begged them to let him go.
"I said, `If he had a chance, he would have shot me. Now you tell me to let him go?' He said, `Let me go, please, let me go.' I said, `No, you're going to see the police,'" Younis said.
A customer waiting in her car called 911 while the two men held down the intruder. Ensinger and Horton have been charged with several counts; they did not get away with anything.
The pair will also face child endangerment charges after Anne Arundel County police say they found Ensinger's nine-month-old baby abandoned in the couple's hotel room.
