Four brazen thieves who targeted two Benton Township mobile phone stores within minutes of one another in armed robberies are being held in the Berrien County Jail after they were apprehended following a police chase that ended when their car crashed in a construction zone on the Kalamazoo River Bridge project near Saugatuck. The four were from Grand Rapids, Kentwood and Muskegon according to Benton Township Police Detective Lt. Michael DenDooven.
DenDooven says his department was dispatched around 4:40 in the afternoon, Thursday, June 17th, to the AT&T Store at 1359 Mall Drive concerning an armed robbery there. Just minutes later his department was also called to the T-Mobile Store at 1976 Mall Drive on report of another armed robbery.
At both robbery scenes, witnesses reported seeing four men climb into a black Audi SUV in making their escape. Employees at T-Mobile told police the men had forced them to open a safe and then made off with a number of cellular phones.
Clerks at the AT&T Store say that no merchandise was taken in that incident thanks to the rapid response from police.
DenDooven says that officers briefly spotted the fleeing Audi SUV, but lost sight of the vehicle in traffic, howver, Berrien County Central Dispatch informed them that one of the stolen cellular phones had an active tracking device.
While Berrien County Dispatchers were receiving the GPS coordinates from the T-Mobile security team, police began pursuing a gray Nissan SUV, which fled from them headed east on I-94 to the interchange with northbound I-196. Dispatchers continued to update officers with the coordinates of the cellular phone tracking device, allowing them to pursue the SUV.
Multiple Police agencies throughout Berrien, Van Buren and Allegan counties assisted with the pursuit of the Nissan SUV, and say that the pursuit ended in a construction area on northbound 196 at the Kalamazoo River bridge, where the vehicle crashed into another driver on the roadway. All four men in the Nissan SUV fled on foot, but were apprehended by assisting police officers.
Pursuing officers saw the people in the escaping SUV throwing items from vehicle during the pursuit, and managed to recover some of that property at the conclusion of the chase. The property recovered included cellular phones, particularly the cellular phone containing the GPS tracking device taken from the T-Mobile Store.
Berrien County Sheriff’s Department Deputies located the original vehicle, the black Audi, parked in a parking lot in close proximity to the T-Mobile Store. Both vehicles were towed to the Benton Township Police Department as evidence. Both vehicles had been reported stolen out of the Grand Rapids area.
All four men were lodged at the Berrien County Jail on charges of Unarmed Robbery, Safe Robbery, Receiving and Concealing Stolen Property with three of the men having multiple warrants from agencies throughout Southwest Michigan.
DenDooven says that additional charges may be sought in other jurisdictions.
Benton Township Police were assisted in the case by the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department, Pokagon Tribal Police, the Michigan State Police, South Haven Police Department, Saugatuck-Douglas Police and the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department.
At the conclusion of the chase, traffic was backed up on northbound I-196 for miles from Saugatuck south due to the crash and ensuing foot chase, with traffic eventually being rerouted to Blue Star Highway over the Kalamazoo River.
