Three men, two of whom were armed, on Thursday morning staged a daring robbery on Nedd’s Uplift Bakery at the corner of Garnett and Middleton streets but it all went wrong.
At the end of the ten-minute ordeal, a bandit/ employee had been shot twice in the legs, one had been captured unhurt and the third managed to get away. The locked box with about $100,000 which represented the sales from the night before was left abandoned in a nearby walkway.
The trio stuck up the owner Parbattie Nedd and two female staff members. One of the women managed to escape and raised an alarm and it was at this point that the bandits grabbed the locked box and made a mad dash for freedom. However, two of them were caught and the third who was armed with a gun fled the scene.
Stabroek News was reliably informed yesterday that the bandit who was shot is wanted by the police for murder. He is currently a patient at the city hospital after undergoing surgery.
When this newspaper arrived on the scene, the popular bakery was open for business and there were no visible signs on the outside of what had happened earlier. How-ever, inside the bakery was a different story. Fear and shock was still evident on the faces of the employees. The owner, Parbattie Nedd, suffered the brunt of the attack as she was the first person the bandits accosted.
Nedd’s face and neck bore scrapes and bruises and the woman was spitting blood when this newspaper saw her. With shock evident in her voice the elderly woman said that at about 5.45 am one of her employees, who had recently resumed work, brought two men to the establishment seeking employment. “I tell him that I already got six staff and I don’t want any more. I tell him that they could wait outside until my son comes and see if he wants to take one of them,” she added, her voice breaking up. Nedd said shortly after, a customer came to collect bread and left and the employee, who had been bagging tennis rolls opened the grille door to the bakery, let the two men in and then locked it back. The shop was not yet opened for business.
She said the employee ran into the front section of the shop, where she was, and started choking her and she reacted by screaming. With tears welling up in her eyes, the woman said she fell to the ground and the employee sat on her and continued to choke her. “I start to bleed through my nose and all my spectacles fall down and break,” she added. The woman related that the employee wanted her to go upstairs but she told him that there was nothing up there and that he should take the money box that was sitting on a nearby table.
Nedd said she was told that the other two men had a gun and an ice-pick. She said that one of her staff managed to escape through a side door and started hollering for her sons who live at the back of the bakery. She said the employee who was holding her captive was taking her to the staircase leading to the upper flat when someone started banging loudly on the locked grille door to the bakery. She said that prior to this the man was not only choking her but that he had been covering her mouth with his hands to prevent her from screaming. “All de blood was gushing out of my nose. I started seeing dark. My son starting knocking on the door and like he get scared and they grab the box and run through the door,” she said.
According to Nedd only two of the bandits ran though the door. She said that the third man was standing near a door on the opposite side and she opened it to let him out but her neighbours ambushed the man and gave him a sound thrashing before handing him over to the police. “I open the door for he to run out because he didn’t do me nothing,” she said, adding that it was the screaming and commotion that had alerted nearby residents to the robbery.
Nedd said the police arrived promptly and that the fleeing bandits left the box with the money outside in their bid to escape. She said that it was locked and that she had the keys.
The employee who had held onto her, she said, ran into a neighbour’s house where police later caught him. Nedd said, “This is the first time this happen to we since we open this bakery. It’s around since about 1970.”
Following the ordeal, the woman was taken to a city hospital and was told that her pressure was high. Nedd said “I am shaken up
