Two men robbed of workers’ wages

Jensen LaVende

Two men who were car­ry­ing large sums of mon­ey to pay work­ers at con­struc­tion sites were robbed in two sep­a­rate in­ci­dents on Fri­day.

Po­lice re­port­ed that a 51-year-old Venezue­lan man was robbed of $94,000 at a con­struc­tion site at North Hills, Cu­tu­cu­pano Road, San­ta Cruz.

Around 2:07 pm, the vic­tim, a pay­roll clerk with Home So­lu­tions, was ap­proached by two men, one armed with a gun, who de­mand­ed the work­ers’ wages.

Af­ter hand­ing over the mon­ey, the man alert­ed a se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cer on du­ty, who had a brief shoot-out with one of the men, while the sec­ond ban­dit ran off with the cash, which was to be used to pay about 70 work­ers.

The sus­pect, a Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic na­tion­al, was sub­dued with the help of work­ers be­fore be­ing hand­ed over to po­lice.

Both the sus­pect and the vic­tim were tak­en to the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex for med­ical at­ten­tion.

About an hour lat­er, a 46-year-old con­trac­tor was robbed of a grey knap­sack con­tain­ing $91,000 in cash, an­oth­er $16,000 which he kept in the ve­hi­cle’s con­sole, and his Sam­sung A54 cell­phone val­ued at $2,500.

The man was on his way to pay work­ers at a job site at Beau­mont Ridge, Mar­aval, when a sil­ver Toy­ota Aqua pulled in front of his ve­hi­cle near St An­drew’s Pri­vate School.

Po­lice re­port­ed that two masked men came out of the car, one armed with a gun, and asked the vic­tim, “where de mon­ey”.

Af­ter tak­ing the mon­ey, the masked men en­tered their ve­hi­cle and es­caped.

Of­fi­cers from Mar­aval Po­lice Sta­tion lat­er re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that the get­away car, bear­ing false reg­is­tra­tion plates PDZ5015, had been aban­doned at Riverview Ter­race, Mar­aval.

The emp­tied grey knap­sack was found in­side the car.