LAUDERHILL, FLA. (WSVN) - Police have arrested two men who, they said, robbed several convenience stores in Lauderhill and other parts of Broward County, targeting the businesses for a single item: Red Bull drinks.
Lauderhill Police took into custody Shaquan Robersin and Marquis Wright, both 28, Wednesday morning.
Surveillance video from a Sept. 13 robbery at a 7-Eleven in Lauderhill captured one of the suspects crawling into the store’s front freezer. The footage shows him completely disappearing head first into the freezer.
Lauderhill Police Lt. Mike Santiago said the robbers had been targeting local stores for months.
“Over the past three months, these individuals were actually going into different stores within the City of Lauderhill and actually taking cases of Red Bull,” he said.
Investigators dubbed the duo the “Red Bull crooks.”
“You’ll see them in the video getting into the freezer through the front, and they would go to the back and start taking cases of Red Bull, setting them up outside,” said Santiago.
Police said the suspects took off with thousands of dollars worth of the energy drink. Detectives believe they were stealing the drinks in order to resell them.
“I’d never seen anything like this, where they’re actually going into the front, crawling through the front refrigerator and spending some time out in the back identifying which cases of the energy drinks to take,” said Santiago.
Surveillance video shows one of the suspects inside a cold storage room and selecting a case of original flavor Red Bull before carrying it out of the room.
“It’s worth a lot of money. I mean, you have these Red Bull cans, depending upon the size, in excess of $3 a can. They were taking cases of it.”
An exterior surveillance camera shows the suspects getting into an awaiting car that sped away with the doors still open.
Police said the robbers struck three different times in Lauderhill and elsewhere in Broward County.
“They attempted to do the same thing. The clerks were the ones who actually identified them and remembered them from the past and interrupted the actual theft,” said Santiago.
Police apprehended Robersin and Wright Wednesday morning at a 7-Eleven along the 2000 block of North State Road 7 in Lauderhill. Robersin was charged with four counts of burglary and grand theft, and Wright is facing two counts of burglary and grand theft.
“They’re definitely out of energy right now,” said Santiago. “This is a great story. The community actually pulled through on this, working with the police department on this case, and this is not the only place that they’ve done it. We’ve actually identify other jurisdictions where they were doing this.”
Robersin and Wright remain behind bars.
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