It was 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 22, 2015. Paris Henderson and Laura Segraves were working behind the main counter at Roberson's Fine Jewelers in the Pleasant Ridge Town Center on Cantrell Road, facing the front doors that opened onto the parking lot.
They and two other female employees had opened the store at 10 a.m., just like they did every day after spending about an hour taking the jewelry out of the vault. One of the other employees, whose broken leg was in a cast, stood near the counter waiting on a customer wearing high-heeled shoes.
Henderson and Segraves recalled Tuesday for a federal jury that it was just an ordinary workday. So ordinary that they didn't think anything of it when they saw a truck park out front and a man get out and walk toward the shop's front door.
Until it slowly dawned on Henderson, who was getting off the phone with a customer, that the man who had just opened the glass door was placing something in front of it to prop it open, and in the same instant, Segraves realized that a second man had jumped out of the truck and was running into the store.
Before either of them could make a move to automatically lock the doors or activate an alarm, they knew they were being robbed, they told jurors. They described, and jurors saw on videotapes taken by four surveillance cameras inside the store, how the two men were quickly followed into the store by two other men, all wearing hats and face coverings.
While Segraves ran to a back room to activate the alarm and Henderson called 911, receiving no immediate answer, two of the men used sledgehammers to start shattering glass display cases while the other two jumped around the room waving guns.
The blows were so loud that from the back room, Segraves thought they were shooting Henderson. Henderson's screams, as she hung onto the phone and begged for help, overwhelmed the two videos that were accompanied by audio as jurors listened. The customer's legs and high heels could be seen at the edge of one of the videos as she crouched behind a counter.
The testimony of Henderson, sales manager at the store for nine years, and Segraves, the operations manager of 10 years as well as the niece of the store's owners, opened the federal trial of Darris Dewayne Denton and Quinshod Kayla Shaw in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes. Both are charged with conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery and aiding and abetting robbery.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin O'Leary told jurors that Shaw and Denton were the gunmen, while Siee Ramon Russell smashed the cases and Tony Eugene Gabriel -- both of whom have pleaded guilty -- grabbed rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets out of the store's diamond cases and scooped them into a large bag.
Within 50 seconds, the men had left the store and the truck could be seen speeding away.
Darrel Dayon Madden, who like the other defendants is from the Oklahoma City area, later testified that he was waiting in a getaway vehicle behind the shopping center in his black Ford F-150 pickup. He told jurors that the robbers abandoned the truck -- which O'Leary said had been stolen the night before -- and three of them got into his truck, while the fourth got into a Mercedes driven by another conspirator, Jobie Lorenzo Kirk, who was also waiting in the street behind the shopping center.
Madden has pleaded guilty in the case and is serving an eight-year sentence, while Kirk pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.
Madden told jurors that Gabriel, who carried a satchel of jewelry, jumped under the cover of his truck bed and stayed there while he drove the men back to Oklahoma -- about a 3½-hour drive.
At Kirk's house, Madden said, the men dumped the jewelry onto a table and added up the price tags of the stolen jewelry to discover that it had a retail value of about $600,000, although a ring that had been priced at about $30,000 was missing and never found.
Segraves testified that the stolen jewelry -- 66 pieces altogether --had cost Roberson's $321,295.50 to buy wholesale from suppliers in New York, Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and indirectly from Israel.
But what the robbers didn't know, she said, was that a piece of glass that didn't break during the smash-and-grab prevented the robbers from seeing and taking another $1.2 million worth of diamonds.
Defense attorneys -- Nicki Nicolo of Little Rock for Denton and Steven Ray Davis for Shaw -- didn't offer extensive opening statements, but they told jurors to pay careful attention to the testimony of those who have pleaded guilty. They warned jurors that those who are awaiting sentencing are hoping for leniency in exchange for their testimony, and those who have been sentenced are hoping their help will prompt prosecutors to seek a reduction in their sentences.
"There's absolutely no physical evidence linking my client to this crime," Nicolo said, noting that the robbers' faces were covered.
Davis told jurors that his client, who is said to have been the "tall robber," was also described by a co-defendant as having a teardrop tattoo under his eye, but, "Mr. Shaw has no tattoo below his eye."
The trial will resume at 9 a.m. today.
Metro on 03/07/2018