On Wednesday night a man walked into one of Jimmy Jone’s gourmet sandwich stores and cleaned out the till as the cashier calmly looked on.
Terry K Rayford, a fifty-four-year-old black male, entered the sandwich shop at a few minutes past 9 p.m. according to the local authorities. The Kansas City police released a video of the incident on Thursday in a bid to get tips from the public that would lead to the arrest of the suspect.
The video, which went viral on both Facebook and YouTube, showed the entire attack which was caught on film. Rayford entered the store inconspicuously, clad in a light blue sweatshirt and black cape. He was then caught on tape speaking to the cashier as if he were making his order. After that, you would have expected Rayford to pull out his wallet and pay for the sandwiches. Instead, he reached for something below the periphery of the camera. One moment later, Tuker Murray, the shop attendant serving Rayford, was staring down the barrel end of a gun.
Most people would probably react a bit hysterically at that point. It would be that one moment in life when you know you are probably about to die. Murray’s reaction, however, was so far removed from that expectation and it is what made the video released by the authorities popular countrywide. Instead of looking even remotely alarmed, Murray calmly looked at the gun Rayford held to his face. He then systematically took off his working gloves and opened the till. Seemingly ignorant of the threat the gun posed, Murray took out all the cash in the register and passed it across the counter to Rayford.
Rayford, on the other hand, did not seem appeased by the contents of the cash register. Murray noticed that so he lifted the empty till for Rayford’s inspection. Satisfied that the cash register was empty, Rayford looked around, saw a stray dollar lying around and picked it up. The video then showed him exiting the store. Some local papers in Kansas reported that there was a second Jimmy Jone’s employee in the background who Rayford was also keeping an eye on. The Jimmy Jone’s manager was not available for comment.
The Kansas City Police confirmed that they had made an arrest on Friday. Mr. Rayford was taken into custody when a retired police officer identified him from the video that had been circulating social media, according to reports. The US District Attorney’s Office of Kansas will be charging Rayford with the illegal possession of a firearm. The office did not report whether a robbery charge was on the table as well.
This robbery was one of many incidences reported in Kansas City per year. The area records an average of 360 robberies are reported for every 100,000 people in the area. Not many robbery victims can be as stoic as Tuker Murray though. When asked by BBC how he managed to keep his cool, Murray replied, “It was amateur hour.”
