By Paul Thomas
WKYC-TV
ELYRIA, Ohio — Three teens who ordered an extra large pizza with bacon got an unexpected side order of police officers and handcuffs.
Wearing a pizza delivery hat, with a pizza car sign on the roof of a rusty Oldsmobile, and a hole cut in a cardboard pizza box for his gun, an Elyria police officer went undercover as a pizza delivery man.
The teenagers, ages 15 and 16, were arrested Saturday night after police found them in a vacant home with a loaded shotgun.
The undercover operation started after workers at a Marco’s Pizza shop took a suspicious order.
The questionable customer sounded like the same person who phoned in a fake pizza order earlier in the week. In that case, males with sticks approached a female delivery driver at a vacant home; the driver escaped unharmed.
When a pizza shop employee tried to call back the phone number given for the suspicious order, it was disconnected.
"(Suspicious customer) called us three times,” manager Ben Reppas said. “The second time he called he changed his address and gave another bogus (phone) number.”
Police cooked up a plan for canine officer Tom Baracskai to go undercover and pretend to be a pizza delivery man. Other officers surrounded the home where the delivery was to be made.
When officer Baracskai arrived at the vacant home, one of the teens approached him, asking him to go inside.
He told the teen that he need to retrieve the money bag from his car. That’s when two of suspects fled on foot. They were quickly captured.
A third teen was discovered hiding inside the vacant home’s porch. A loaded shotgun was also recovered from the porch.
The teens were charged with aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, resisting arrest and obstruction of official business.
Two Marco’s Pizza drivers have been robbed in the past few months and one of them was punched in the face.
“We worry about the safety of our drivers,” Beal said. “And we just want to get the message out there that people need to stop (messing around) with us. That’s just the bottom line, ‘cause you don’t know if the cops are going to be coming to deliver your pizza.”
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