Getaway Car

A supermarket employee was shot to death last night when he scuffled with one of two holdup men during a robbery of a Thriftway store in Southwest Philadelphia, police said. The shooting occurred about 9:10 p.m., just after the store closed for the day and cashiers were turning in their receipts, police said. The supermarket is in the 5800 block of Lindbergh Boulevard. The victim was identified by police as Dennis Olivere, 34, of the 2500 block of Baynard Boulevard in Wilmington.

He was a cop who needed The Club. Vince Oakes, a 39th Police District officer, could have used the anti-theft device when he answered a call early yesterday at a house in the city's Tioga section. When Oakes came back outside, somebody had stolen his police cruiser. Authorities recovered the car about an hour later, 66 blocks away, without so much as a scrape on it. When police arrived, the alleged thief was sitting on the curb beside the cruiser, reading a newspaper.

Bryan Henderson had only a second or two to react. He had parked his wife's car near their West Philadelphia home shortly after 4 a.m. yesterday, and was climbing out of the front seat when he spotted an auto racing toward him. "The car had no lights on and it was speeding down the street real fast," Henderson, 32, said. "I stood back to let it go by and he floored it so fast that I couldn't really react. " His desperate leap for the roof of his wife's car failed and the last thing he remembered was the speeding car propelling him into the air. Henderson, a crew leader for the Census Bureau, was hospitalized in stable condition with multiple injuries, the only casualty of a convenience store robbery about 10 blocks from his home and a gun battle that followed between the holdup man and police.

A few steps behind death, Scott Wabals watched horrified as an old car, speeding from the scene of a purse-snatching, rammed another car and careened onto a Mayfair sidewalk. Wabals' pal, 19-year-old Michael Marsden, was in its way. The beat-up, 20-year-old Ford Maverick plowed into Marsden with such velocity that it knocked him out of his sneakers and hurled him against a parked van. He died instantly, police said. The alleged purse-snatchers' car flipped twice after the fatal crash at Rowland Avenue and Wellington Street, then plowed into a parked car. The driver and passenger ran from the demolished Maverick.

WYCKOFF, N.J. - Four men involved in a robbery in a North Jersey jewelry store Saturday were captured after their getaway vehicle collided with a police cruiser after a chase through several towns. Two Hawthorne police officers were injured during the chase, which went through communities in Passaic and Bergen Counties. But it was not immediately clear whether any of the suspects were injured in the crash. Authorities said the robbery at Hartgers Jewelers in Wyckoff occurred just before noon.

Two Philadelphia men pleaded guilty yesterday to robbery for their part in the bungled holdup of a Commerce Bank in Atco in June. Martin Payne, 25, and Lawrence McKnight, 24, went into the bank with bank bags on June 19, authorities said. They said McKnight handed the teller a note demanding money and warned that he had a bomb in one of the bags. Payne's job was to be another presence in the bank, said Mindy Mellits, assistant Camden County prosecutor. They were given about $14,000.

Two bandits made off with $105,000 in cash yesterday in this year's first armored car holdup, despite locking their keys inside their getaway car, police said. The absent-minded robbers had two pals waiting in a backup getaway car parked right behind the first one, police said. When they realized they couldn't get into their own vehicle, they jumped into the other car and got away, police said. The incident started shortly after 12:35 p.m., when the two men, one armed with a double-barreled shotgun, approached a Brinks security guard who had just unloaded a cash bag onto a pushcart in front of the CoreStates First Pennsylvania Bank at Ridge Avenue and Domino Lane in Roxborough, police said.

With his pockets stuffed with more than $3,000 in cash and a "getaway car" waiting patiently in the bank parking lot, police say Robert Kenneth Marino was almost free. But the car he used to flee the Upper Darby Commerce Bank that he was charged yesterday with robbing turned out to be easy to spot, police said. Marino, 50, who was arraigned bedside at Delaware County Memorial Hospital after he complained of chest pains during his arrest, was caught cruising in a cab, spotted in traffic by a Lansdowne Borough police officer who heard descriptions of Marino and the cab dispatched across police radios.

Four men charged with swiping a case of transmission fluid during a gas-station robbery yesterday found their getaway anything but smooth. Chased by police, the suspects, fleeing in a 1983 Buick, struck several cars and were nabbed as they tried to run away. Two unidentified citizens stopped Patrolman Joseph Williams at Bank and Randolph Streets at 2 a.m. and informed him that several men had just robbed the Global gas station in the 2100 block of Admiral Wilson Boulevard and that the getaway car was waiting on the nearby Baird Boulevard overpass.

A resident of Philadelphia's Logan neighborhood told jurors that on the day 7-year-old Erica Pratt escaped from her captors during the summer, she saw four men leave the unoccupied house where Pratt was later discovered. And, said neighbor Loretta Deshazer, one of them was James Burns, 30, the Philadelphia man that prosecutors say drove the getaway car after accomplice Edward Johnson grabbed Pratt near her grandmother's Southwest Philadelphia home. Another witness, William Myers, testified Friday that he saw Burns at the house.

A shoot-out during an attempted convenience store robbery in North Philadelphia on Sunday night left one of the suspects dead on the street and the store owner in critical condition at Temple University Hospital. At around 8 p.m., according to a Philadelphia Police report, four males entered La Familia Latina, a mini-mart at Westmoreland and N. Fifth Streets, attempting to rob it. A robber about 26 years old, according to police, shot the male store owner once in the right side of the stomach.

Robbery suspects shot by police in N. Phila. * 21st Street near York Two suspects in an armed robbery were hospitalized after being shot by undercover police in North Philadelphia yesterday, and cops were searching for a third man who fled. The shooting unfolded about 4:40 p.m. after four undercover narcotics officers saw two men rob a man at gunpoint. When police approached the men, one of them fired at least five shots at cops, Lt. Ray Evers, a police spokesman, said, adding that three of the officers returned fire.

Forty-five seconds is all it took for three masked, gun-toting men to rob a jewelry store in Evesham Township, N.J., of $450,000 worth of jewelry Thursday night, police said. The men entered the Jay Roberts Jewelry store on Route 73, and announced the robbery around 7:45 p.m., police said. They ordered employees to the ground, and one man used a hammer to smash glass display cases. He stuffed watches and other items into a white cloth bag while his accomplices stood by, police said.

The getaway driver fleeing the scene of a theft at the King of Prussia Mall lost control, slammed into a brick wall and ended up in the hospital along with four other suspects Wednesday afternoon. After they sped away from the mall in a black Monte Carlo at about 12:20 p.m., Upper Merion Township police spotted the suspects trying to ditch evidence in a nearby business parking lot. When the suspects realized police were nearby, they fled the area barreling along South Gulph Road.

WYCKOFF, N.J. - Four men involved in a robbery in a North Jersey jewelry store Saturday were captured after their getaway vehicle collided with a police cruiser after a chase through several towns. Two Hawthorne police officers were injured during the chase, which went through communities in Passaic and Bergen Counties. But it was not immediately clear whether any of the suspects were injured in the crash. Authorities said the robbery at Hartgers Jewelers in Wyckoff occurred just before noon.

Stephen, we hardly knew ye The Daily Strasburg Report is about to go on hiatus. We're going to miss sharing our all-too-regular updates on Washington's Stephen Strasburg, our favorite Rookie Phenom, now that he has a torn elbow ligament and appears headed for Tommy John surgery and could be out of action for the next 12 to 18 months. At least Phils fans got a glimpse of him in his abbreviated final start for the Nationals last Saturday at Citizens Bank Park. Well, at least Strasburg resigned from the Brett Myers School of Really Bad Facial Hair and shaved off that horrid beard he was sporting against the Phils last week.

Ten weeks ago, when the jurors were selected, the death penalty was an abstraction, something they promised the judge they would to consider if the evidence warranted. On Friday, possibility becomes reality as seven men and five women begin deliberating the fates - death by lethal injection or life in prison without parole - of two men they found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2008 shooting of Philadelphia Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. The Common Pleas Court jury on Thursday heard impassioned closing speeches by the city prosecutor and lawyers for Eric DeShann Floyd, 35, of North Philadelphia, and Levon T. Warner, 41, of West Philadelphia.

The snapshot could come from any family album: young boy, big smile, leaning casually against the front stairs of his house. The only ominous note is a beer can sitting on the steps near the boy's hand. And on the reverse side, the hand-lettered legend: "Eric Floyd. Only 7 or 8 and he's a drunk. " Defense witnesses Wednesday added the backstory to the snapshot for a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury, describing the chaotic, violent, lawless, drug-addled household in which a future police killer was reared.

There were times in the two years since her husband was killed that "I wished I was with him, instead of being here and dealing with all this stuff," Michelle Liczbinski said. But she had three children to worry about and a grandchild on the way, and "knew I would have to stand up for him at his trial. " On Tuesday she did just that, describing to a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury, briefly and simply, the agonizing aftermath of May 3, 2008. On that day, Stephen Liczbinski, 39 - her husband of two decades, a police sergeant of a dozen years - was shot to death pursuing bank robbers through Port Richmond.

Sullen and obstinate and blindly ignoring questions, Eric DeShann Floyd finally got his time before the jury this morning and denied any involvement in the 2008 killing of Philadelphia police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski and preceding bank robbery. After a morning of fits and starts in which he got more time to consult with his lawyers, Floyd, 35, took the witness stand about 11:20 a.m. and verbally sparred with his own attorney, Earl G. Kauffman, and then with Assistant District Attorney Jude Conroy.