FOX 29 has obtained Philadelphia Police surveillance video of a team of gun-toting bandits during a string of armed robberies on the street.
Concern spread quickly among neighbors near Chew and Chelten avenues after a three-man team of armed robbers swept through the area, striking three times in less than an hour early Wednesday morning.
"Now I'm gonna be looking over my shoulder," said Skip Hanna.
"You don't know. You can't just look at people and think they're not gonna do things," said Dorothy Jones, who's lived here 37 years.
"I wouldn't walk by myself. I wouldn't walk by myself," another resident told FOX 29.
Police say the trio of bandits moved quickly. They used a green Chrysler minivan to make their escape in each of the three on-street holdups. One of the fast-moving bandits was armed with a handgun as the string of robberies got under way just after 6 a.m. The gun-toting thieves stole cell phones, cash and other valuables.
"That's the best way to catch people off-guard, I guess," Hanna said."Run around that time of the morning. Nobody's expecting anything."
A police department surveillance camera at Chew and Chelten caught one of the gunpoint robberies on tape in the city's real-time crime center. The robbery went down despite signs warning that the area is monitored by cameras.
"I think that's the best thing they could have done for the neighborhood, yeah," Jones added.
People who live in this Germantown neighborhood are worried the street corner stickup crew might return. They would like to see more surveillance cameras in place across the area.
"I think they're great. I think they should be everywhere," Hanna explained. "You get this caught on the camera and you got prosecution of it right away. You can get this riff-raff off the streets."
Friday, May 24 2013 5:48 PM EDT2013-05-24 21:48:26 GMT
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