Teen robbery suspects rob Seattle Subway

Armed robberies terrorize Seattle employees

The robbers are accused of hitting the South Seattle Subway not once, but three times.

SEATTLE - Shocking video shows the moment that a Subway worker in Seattle was robbed at gunpoint. However, the area manager for the franchisee says this case has been solved. Chris Rodrigues tells FOX 13 that police contacted him and told him the suspects had been arrested.

On Friday, FOX 13 told you police arrested three teens, one as young as 15, who they believe are responsible for around 78 cases involving shootings, carjackings and armed robberies.

The robbers are accused of hitting the South Seattle Subway not once, not twice, but three times.

Rodrigues says that because the Subway is a "cash controlled" store, they got away with next to nothing compared to the seriousness of the crimes they are accused of.

The security video shows the armed robbery crew that Rodrigues said terrorized his Subway employees three times in the span of a few days, starting around September 28th.

"It was very traumatic," said Rodrigues, area manager for the franchisee.

He says the same crew was back again the very next night shift, bursting in on his employees at around 2:30 am.

"They put a gun to my employee's head and told him that they were going kill him if they didn’t open the safe. He’s like, ‘I can’t open the safe, I don’t have the combination’.", said Rodrigues.

He says the robbers didn't like what they heard, so they trashed equipment throughout the store, including inside the office.

"They got mad so they threw that phone against the wall, and they went into the back, and they started ripping out the modem and all the equipment off the walls. They broke our register. We couldn’t even open the next day," said Rodrigues. "It took us two days to have a new register expedited to us. We were closed for a few days."

He says when the store finally reopened around October 7th, employees got a call from a strange Google number, asking what time they were closing. He says his staff members got a strange feeling in their guts it might be the robbers, and later that evening, they were back.

"Sure enough, at 11:00 pm, they came again," he said. "But, they had the safe wide open. We had nothing in the store. They were in and out in 50 seconds," he said.

Rodrigues says by then they had also gone cashless.

"It’s a small group that did a whole lot of damage to a lot of people. It’s not just us, there were customers in the stores, customers in the 7-11’s. I hope the courts take that into account," said Rodrigues.

His employees were left shaken.

"The employee that was robbed on those two days was like, I can’t come back to work unless they catch them, and he’s been with us for 12 years," he said.

With the group accused of nearly 80 crimes, he wondered what might have driven the group to make these choices.

"What is missing from their life, that they felt this is what they needed to go to? To terrorize for not a lot of money?," he said.