We Were Robbed

And Lived To Tell About It


I’ve thus far avoided writing about this story here on the blog because it’s something very personal that happened a long time ago, but my earlier posting about Marine Corporal Thomas Audry’s successful defense of his life in the face of five robbers on a Midtown Atlanta Street Monday night has brought it back to the forefront of my memory.

Here goes…

Way back in January of 1979, three of my friends and I walked into a Pizza Hut Restaurant on North Avenue in downtown Atlanta about 10:00 PM. We had just finished watching the first Saturday Night Live Special in our dorm rooms at Georgia Tech and decided to grab a late pizza to cap off an evening of immature college revelry.

We stopped by the “Tillie The Teller Machine” to get some cash, and then parked outside the front door of the restaurant parking lot, entered the building, and waited while the young waitress seated us in a booth across the room from the front door.

The waitress was acting, shall we say, a little strange, but we were hungry and stupid and just sat down and dove into the menus in anticipation of devouring the upcoming culinary delights we were planning on ordering. I was sitting on the outside of the booth, facing the kitchen, and we were all stunned to attention when a black man in a raincoat emerged, pulled out and pumped a 12 gauge shotgun, and shouted “EVERYBODY…GET THE F**K IN THE BACK.”

What then ensued were ten or fifteen minutes of total hell and chaos that in retrospect seemed like an eternity.

The four black men, three pistols, and one shotgun were doing all of the talking, and the bad guys were quite unhappy that we had interrupted their enterprise, but also quite willing to include four white boys in their little party.

I was 19 years young, had a short military haircut, and was in great shape at the time. It took every bit of restraint in my stupid head to not engage the robbers in a fight. They were wild eyed, drugged up looking scrawny assed little middle aged men and I could have probably kicked all of their asses by myself if they didn’t have guns, but I had to think of the safety of my three white friends and the ten or so other African American customers, staff, and one child that were herded into the back of the restaurant while the events unfolded.

I remember seeing that there was a great big chef’s knife lying on the counter that I walked past while one of our hosts held the barrel of his sawed off shotgun shoved into my back. Then there was the tactical mistake the stupid fools made when they placed themselves in a confined space with their hostages. Everyone knows that space and terrain are your friends when in an assault. There I was, thinking like I was in the military or something--come to think of it, I was.

People were frantic, it was every man and woman for themselves, and my only mistake was remaining calm and PAYING TOO DAMN MUCH ATTENTION to what was happening around me.

I could have probably killed at least a couple of my attackers, but how many other people including myself could have been killed or wounded in the struggle?

Compliance was the best resort.

They told everyone to lie down on the floor, but being the silly fool that I am and, seeing that the floor in the small back room was covered with people, I elected to crouch down. My next mistake was looking around when one of our assailants, standing amid the pile of bodies, swung around and pointed his handgun at one of the women customers and yelled for her to “shut her crying toddler up.”

I was actually ready to do a little crying of my own at that point, and when I reacted to the man’s gesture he responded by pounding his gun's barrel across the top of my head.

It must have felt good to him, because he continued to punctuate everything he said by pounding on the top and back of my head as I started slumping closer to the floor. At one point after several blows had been delivered I looked up and noticed that the barrel of the gun was bent upwards at a 45 degree angle. I suspect that the weapon had been used as a hammer before because my head is hard, but not THAT hard.

After a few more blows, the barrel of the gun broke off and landed in the floor beside me. One of the other idiots picked up the barrel, looked at me, and then laughed and said something about my hard head as he tossed the barrel into the adjacent trash can, fingerprints and all.

Once they started pistol whipping me I was angry enough to do something stupid, but in the end I just went with the flow and ended up surrendering my watch and the twenty dollars in my wallet.

One of the guys was freaking out as they discussed their exit from the building and what to do with the witnesses. He said “let’s just shoot them all” which elicited screams of panic from my fellow captors. Someone then suggested that we be locked into the walk-in freezer.

Sounded like a plan to me…

When the door was opened, I hate to admit that I was the first one through it as the blood was dripping down my face and the back of my head. (I was the only one injured besides the restaurant manager.) We were herded inside and the door was closed leaving us huddled together in the cramped space surrounded by giant cans of pizza sauce and wads of dough in total darkness.

Then, impossibly, some idiot standing up front LIT A CIGARETTE.

Can you believe that?

Then everyone started arguing about how long to stay inside (there was an inside safety handle) and some wanted to wait a while.

I said that I was sure that our assailants had immediately fled the scene, but no one was willing to be the first outside and I was stranded in the back corner of the cooler because of my prior hasty entrance.

After a few more minutes of verbal wrangling, the door was opened and as we walked with relief into the empty restaurant the Atlanta police were arriving in the parking lot. Someone had apparently noticed the empty building with unlocked doors and called 911.

The cops jacked around awhile while they took our statements, and several of our co-victims unceremoniously exited the building without delivering any statements. I suspect that they might have actually been involved in “casing” the establishment prior to the robbery or had other aversions to discussing their identity with the authorities.

I expressed my confidence that I could absolutely identify all four suspects, but I never heard another word about the incident from the Atlanta Police Department and I declined Pizza Hut’s offer of monetary compensation.

As far as I know, the local TV and newspapers never picked up the story because it was just another example of life in the big city.

I can just see the potential headline "White Navy Midshipman Shits Pants In Pizza Hut Altercation--Four Assailants Dead At Scene."

Needless to say that my Mom was ready to pack my butt up and move me back to the safety of south Alabama as a result. I don't make a big deal about it, but to this day I am very cautious when I enter buildings and am aware of the situation around me when in public. I don't like it when I walk into a store or restaurant and don't seen anyone working or shoping/eating there.

In the end I got about twelve free stitches in the back of my head at the campus infirmary to close the three or four cuts opened in my skin, and other than Rusty, Tom, Dave, and I having a pretty exciting story to tell every once in a while, as the old saying goes...

It is just a bit of "Ancient History."

Live and learn...