Getaway Car

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.

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.

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 branch of the Main Line Federal Savings Bank that opened last week was robbed Wednesday afternoon by two armed men who entered the bank, announced a holdup, and escaped with $1,146. Police said the robbers, whose faces were not covered, were assisted by a woman who drove a silver Chevrolet Chevette hatchback in which the men escaped. The woman drove the car, with the two men inside, into the bank's parking lot at 1141 Baltimore Pike about 2:15 p.m., police said. She went into the bank and asked for directions to Township Line Road, police said.

The 94-year-old grandmother heard a knock at her front door a little before 10 on Sunday morning. Living alone in a house in the city's Mayfair section, she peeked out the window and saw a man in a brown jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. She thought it was her grandson and unlocked the door. The young man burst into her home, demanding money and jewelry. She resisted. He pushed her, slapped her face and punched her in the eye. After the woman fell back on the sofa, the intruder put duct-tape on her mouth and around her wrists.

The 94-year-old grandmother heard a knock at her front door a little before 10 on Sunday morning. Living alone in a house in the city's Mayfair section, she peeked out a window and saw a man in a brown jacket with fur-trimmed hood. She thought it was her grandson and unlocked the door. The young man burst into her home, demanding money and jewelry. She resisted. He pushed her, slapped her face, and punched her in an eye. After the woman fell back on the sofa, the intruder put duct tape on her mouth and around her wrists.

Surveillance video has provided police with an image of the getaway car used in the January slaying of Joseph Canazaro, 48, a businessman with a troubled financial past who was killed in his Hilltown home by two armed robbers. At a news conference, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler presented video from a business overlooking the Quakertown Plaza Shopping Center showing what authorities believe to be a red, four-door Nissan sedan pulling up next to the Lincoln pickup truck that the killers stole from Canazaro's home.

NEW YORK - Police on Thursday continued an aggressive manhunt for a gunman and a getaway driver who ambushed and killed a Los Angeles man in midtown Manhattan, saying they're following multiple leads and have searched the victim's home for clues. The push came amid published reports that the New York Police Department had identified the driver. Officials dismissed the reports, saying they consider the driver a possible witness who has run the risk of working with a stone-cold triggerman.

WASHINGTON - White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2043, according to new census projections. America continues to grow and become more diverse due to higher birthrates among minorities, particularly for Hispanics who entered the U.S. at the height of the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since the mid-2000 housing bust, however, the arrival of millions of immigrants from Mexico and other nations has slowed from its once-torrid pace. The country's changing demographic mosaic has stark political implications, shown clearly in last month's election that gave President Obama a second term - in no small part due to his support from 78 percent of nonwhite voters.

LUCK HAS RUN OUT for two men who may be responsible for a rash of drugstore heists in the Northeast and who unwittingly swiped a bottle of pills embedded with a GPS tracking device Monday night, police said. The pair allegedly robbed a Rite Aid on Roosevelt Boulevard near Solly Avenue in Rhawnhurst at gunpoint about 9:30 p.m. and took off with pain pills, as robbers have in several similar incidents over the last few months, police said. But Rite Aid and police outsmarted the pair: The pharmacy, investigators said, had placed a GPS tracking device in at least one of the pill bottles the gunmen allegedly stole, giving cops a way to track them down.

A man who allegedly drove the getaway car in a March 24 murder-for-hire at a Chinese restaurant in Grays Ferry was ordered Wednesday to stand trial for murder. Marcus C. Pough, 25, was charged with murder, possession of a prohibited firearm, and related charges in a preliminary hearing before Municipal Court Judge Patrick F. Dugan. Formal arraignment is scheduled for Nov. 7. The charges stem from the shooting death of Damon G. Stafford, 20, at the Twin Dragon restaurant. Called to the stand by Assistant District Attorney Lorraine Donnelly, Philadelphia Homicide Detective William Sierra read from a statement he took from Pough in which Pough acknowledged owning the van used in the murder.

A man who allegedly drove the getaway car in a March 24 murder-for-hire at a Chinese restaurant in Grays Ferry was ordered Wednesday to stand trial for murder. Marcus C. Pough, 25, is charged with murder, possession of a prohibited firearm, and related charges in a preliminary hearing before Municipal Court Judge Patrick F. Dugan. Formal arraignment is scheduled for Nov. 7. The charges stem from the March 24shooting death of Damon G. Stafford, 20, at the Twin Dragon Chinese restaurant.

An Abington Township police officer was hospitalized and an alleged bank robber in custody Friday after a car chase that began in Jenkintown and "wound all over Philadelphia," police said. Police identified the suspect as Aaron K.M. Thomas, 47, of the 100 block of North 54th Street in West Philadelphia. He was awaiting arraignment Friday on robbery and related offenses, according to Abington Township Deputy Police Chief John Livingood. Livingood said that about 11:15 a.m. a man went into the PNC Bank at 123 Old York Rd., tossed a plastic bag onto the teller's counter, and said: "Fill it up. " No threats were made, no note was shown, and no bank employees were injured, Livingood said.