Bartholomew Roberts
Member
The following video shows the beginning of the robbery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuUNyIVX8Pg&feature=youtu.be
The victim in this case was initially assaulted as he pulled into his driveway. He had turned off the car and exited the vehicle when they appear. He and his wife were forced inside the house where he was robbed of a handgun (unclear whether he was carrying it at the time or had it inside the house) and $30,000 in cash. The victim had set up a camera in his driveway, so the initial takedown was caught on camera and is what is shown on the youtube video above.
As you can see, his 6-7 attackers used cover very well to approach him, he had maybe a second or two to make his fight or flight decision and based on the video, it looks like he froze long enough that the decision was made for him. With that many attackers and that little time to react, he really didn't have a lot of options, though the attackers did approach single file which might have helped had he chose to fight.
Given the recent discussions about home invasion and the potential for criminals to use the entering or exit of your home as a chance to target you, I thought this would be a good example for a discussion of how we might avoid similar situations and what we can do to increase the difficulty of such an attack.
One of the obvious suggestions is it seems likely these guys knew they had a high value target, so somewhere along the line, information security was not as good as it might have been and word of a valuable target got out to the wrong people. Another useful item would have been a remote garage door opener and being able to park the car in the garage. While it isn't foolproof, it would have required his attackers to loiter much closer to the house and possibly give him a chance to spot them first or to avoid them entirely by being inside the house by the time the car was shut off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuUNyIVX8Pg&feature=youtu.be
The victim in this case was initially assaulted as he pulled into his driveway. He had turned off the car and exited the vehicle when they appear. He and his wife were forced inside the house where he was robbed of a handgun (unclear whether he was carrying it at the time or had it inside the house) and $30,000 in cash. The victim had set up a camera in his driveway, so the initial takedown was caught on camera and is what is shown on the youtube video above.
As you can see, his 6-7 attackers used cover very well to approach him, he had maybe a second or two to make his fight or flight decision and based on the video, it looks like he froze long enough that the decision was made for him. With that many attackers and that little time to react, he really didn't have a lot of options, though the attackers did approach single file which might have helped had he chose to fight.
Given the recent discussions about home invasion and the potential for criminals to use the entering or exit of your home as a chance to target you, I thought this would be a good example for a discussion of how we might avoid similar situations and what we can do to increase the difficulty of such an attack.
One of the obvious suggestions is it seems likely these guys knew they had a high value target, so somewhere along the line, information security was not as good as it might have been and word of a valuable target got out to the wrong people. Another useful item would have been a remote garage door opener and being able to park the car in the garage. While it isn't foolproof, it would have required his attackers to loiter much closer to the house and possibly give him a chance to spot them first or to avoid them entirely by being inside the house by the time the car was shut off.