Shards of broken glass are the only visible evidence of an armed robbery early Thursday in Parkville.
"I just heard gunshots,” said Dave Allen who lives nearby, “Well, I heard glass breaking outside and I saw like lights kind of flashing in the bedroom window and I didn't know what it was."
Baltimore County police soon learned it was a calculated, cold-blooded crime with its roots in Baltimore.
In the food desert that is this area or Northwest Baltimore, Charlie's Chinese Food on Park Heights Avenue may seem like an oasis, but early Thursday, its owners became easy targets.
"The restaurant owners took some cash from the restaurant and were on their way home,” said Officer Jennifer Peach of the Baltimore County Police Department, “They said that they thought they were being followed and once they did get to their home and one of them started to get out of their vehicle, they saw another vehicle had pulled up behind them and a few people got out of that vehicle and started to approach them."
The victims say three masked gunmen in their late teens or early twenties never said a word, but their handguns spoke for them.
"They're trying to take the bag from the woman who is resisting them because there's a large sum of cash in it, her personal belongings, her purse and some other items, and during the course of that resistance, we know at least one of the suspects fired shots,” said Peach, “We know that two of the windows of the vehicle had shots fired through them, and then later on when we were interviewing the male victim, we were able to discover there was a bullet hole in his hat."
A bullet that miraculously didn't even graze the victim, who later recalled finding his car doors ajar as he was leaving the take-out restaurant.
It's now believed the robbers may have followed the victims home after coming up empty in their earlier search of the car.
