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LAYTON — An 18-year-old man was arrested early Friday morning after police used a video he sent to a friend through Facebook to connect him with a Tuesday armed robbery of a Chevron gas station, according to a jail report.
Brandon Thomas Parcell, of Layton, was arrested by a SWAT team and Layton police executing a search warrant at his apartment and was booked into Davis County Jail on suspicion of aggravated robbery and theft, according to Layton police.
Police responded to a report of an armed robbery at a Chevron, located at 1508 N. Highway 89, shortly before 7 a.m. Tuesday. They said a man walked into the store, pointed a gun at a clerk and demanded money from a cash register before he fled the store.
The clerk told police he initially only gave the man all the $20 bills, but the man demanded all of the cash in the register till at the time, which was estimated to be $300 to $400, according to the jail report.
Two days later, police met with two confidential informants who showed officers a Facebook video they say Parcell had sent to a friend. In the video, a man was “holding a stack of money ranging from $20, $10 and $1 dollar (sic) bills” and also bragged that he had “robbed a gas station,” the report stated.
The jail report added that the video showed the man from the waist down, where he was wearing the “exact same style of shoe, to include the name brand tags on the shoes as seen in the suspect video surveillance at Chevron just hours prior during the robbery.”
Police executed the warrant shortly after midnight Friday morning, where Parcell was taken into custody and interviewed. Parcell told investigators he had robbed the Chevron store “for an adrenaline rush and to get some extra money for him to spend on things,” police wrote in the jail report. The report added that Parcell had gotten the gun from an unidentified friend.
Authorities executing the warrant also recovered the clothes seen in the surveillance video of the robbery, the report added.
Parcell also confessed to vehicle burglaries in Logan and thefts in Ogden prior to the armed robbery in Layton, according to the report.
The report said the friend who had received the Facebook video told police on Thursday that he was with Parcell and two other people Monday night planning to go to Logan to break into cars. The friend then asked to be dropped off elsewhere when a fifth person he didn’t know joined them and showed off a gun.
Parcell, who turned 18 in August, has no previous criminal history in Utah’s court system.
