BRIDGEPORT — When a gunman barged into the Wallace Food Store and demanded cash and cigarettes, the clerk behind the counter already knew the thug's brand of smokes.
That's because the bandit and his family have been loyal customers of the corner store for years, with the shopkeepers even extending them a monthly line of credit despite the store's firm policy against it, the owner of the store said Tuesday.
"[My nephew] knew the kid. He was shocked because he was so stupid. ... He thought he was joking with him," said Sam Altahar, owner of the store at 3758 S. Wallace Ave., which is frequented by the police officers and politicians who live in the surrounding neighborhood.
Altahar said the robbery took place about 7:15 p.m. Friday, when his nephew was working behind the counter.
Security footage shows the partially masked gunman pace in front of the counter, wave the gun around a few times and order the clerk to fetch cash.
All told, the bandit made off with $1,800 and a pack of Newport cigarettes in the minute-long heist. Altahar said the teen may have fled in a blue getaway truck.
Police, who have viewed a copy of the video, said no arrests have been made in the case.
Reached by DNAinfo.com Chicago, relatives of the teen the store believes was responsible for the heist said his parents yanked him and his twin brother out of Bridgeport last month in hopes of steering them away from gang trouble.
The family, whom DNAinfo.com Chicago is not identifying because no charges have been filed in the case, moved to the outskirts of Milwaukee last month, but the two 15-year-old brothers ran away and ended up right back in Bridgeport, the relatives said.
The relatives said they reported the teens as runaways in Wisconsin last week and that multiple friends and former neighbors have spotted the pair around Bridgeport, but police didn't respond to those sightings quickly enough, if they responded at all.
A police spokesman said sightings of missing persons reports are always investigated, but sometimes the cases aren't "at the top of the pyramid."
"There is a triage system. A police officer is not going to go to a report of a missing [person] sighting before a 'shots fired' call. If [the spotter] contacts detectives, detectives will do what they can to get to where the sighting was, or at least contact police officers on the ground," said Officer Veejay Zala, a police spokesman.
"There's a litany of other things that officers have to respond to other than to respond to the sighting of a missing [person]," he said.
That's done little to comfort the alleged teen gunman's family, who said they're confident the boy will soon be arrested, which could send him spiraling further into a life of crime.
"He needs to be off the street," said one relative. "But if the police would've done their jobs, [the teens] would've been back in Wisconsin and none of this would've happened."
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