Robbery attempt is epic fail

WASILLA — A man’s attempt to rob a gas station last week was foiled when the clerk first didn’t believe she was being robbed, and then refused to cooperate.

Wasilla police were called to the Chevron gas station on the Parks Highway at 10:36 p.m., June 24. The initial caller was a man engaged to marry one of the store’s clerks. He was following the suspect as he walked along the highway to the Mug-Shot Saloon.

Wasilla Police Department Officer Bobby Rader writes in papers he filed in court that he was at the store five minutes after the call went out.

The clerk told him “the male suspect came into the store and bought a pack of cigarettes. Immediately afterward, he said, ‘this is a stickup,’” according to Rader’s account.

The clerk asked him to repeat himself because she “wasn’t sure if he was serious because another employee who was inside the store after her shift knew the suspect and had said hello to him.”

The suspect, Rader wrote, repeated himself and the clerk “was confused and asked where his gun was, because she would have given up the money because she didn’t want to get shot. The suspect replied that he didn’t have one (a gun) but he knew how to ‘blow the place up.’ (The clerk) locked the cash register, placed a closed register sign up and walked outside.”

Rader writes that on surveillance video from the store, the suspect can be seen moving behind the counter and messing with the cash register but apparently doesn’t get it open, though he did “possibly take an item sitting on top of it.”

A second employee is then seen on the video confronting the suspect. Rader interviewed that employee as well.

“She confronted the suspect about what he was doing and he also told her that it was a ‘stick-up.’ (The second clerk) yelled at him to leave, which he did,” Rader wrote.

The fiancé of the first clerk was outside and when he found out what happened he followed the suspect to the Mug-Shot. Officers talked to security there who said they’d seen him but he wasn’t around. Officers left.

“Shortly after they called reporting that the male had been hiding in some bushes nearby as officers passed by and he was currently walking along the Parks Highway,” Rader writes.

Officers stopped the man and identified him as Jose Pacheco Jr., 41, of Wasilla. He was the same man on the tapes and store employees said he was the man who tried to rob them.

Pacheco was arrested on an outstanding warrant and on new charges of attempted robbery. He declined to talk to police.

He was jailed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility. As of Saturday afternoon, he was still lodged there.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.