Pizza Hut Robbers Thwarted by Beeping Safe

mark hillary

​West Davie Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale is one of the most culturally diverse, fascinatingly real, and interesting parts of the city, where you can grab some egg-drop soup at a Chinese buffet, a baleada at a Honduran eatery, or a papusa at a Salvadoran joint. But would you really want to rob any of those places?

Thieves looking for a quick cash grab deigned to accost the Pizza Hut at 3924 W. Davie Blvd. on July 9 around 8:40 p.m., perhaps thinking that's when the store would have accumulated the most money. It sounds like the employees were plenty scared: Thinking about pepperoni placement one minute to how it might feel getting shot in the head the next tends to have that effect.

According to the Fort Lauderdale cops, a pair of black males in their 20s came in brandishing handguns, their faces covered by towels -- which makes one wonder, wouldn't that be hot on a July evening? Why not thin, gauzy surgical masks or maybe something casual (yet sporty!) like a chiffon scarf?
The thieves ordered the workers onto the floor, grabbed cash from a drawer, and ordered the manager to open the safe. But then the safe started in with some incessant beeping (sort of like the heart under the floorboards in that Edgar Allan Poe story -- it's a guilty-conscience thing), and that scared the towel-draped robbers away.

The bad guys headed west, and police established a perimeter, but the pair were nowhere to be found, probably because they ducked into a nearby apartment to count their mozzarella-scented ducats.

An interesting aside: The news release from the FTL PD carried this caveat: "Pizza Hut has asked that you not pass by their business and interrupt them during their work hours."