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Courtney Orton reporting A Sandy pharmacy gets robbed twice, and police say it's by the same guy. The latest hit was Wednesday night. It started when the thief handed a note to the pharmacist asking for Oxycontin. What happened after was what makes this interesting.
Two weeks ago when the man did the same thing, the pharmacist gave him all he could and then chased him with a baseball bat. This time, the suspect just got chased with a golf club.
"Last night, it was like deja vu. When he comes up here this time with a little tiny note, and I saw that OxyContin, and at that time I really got enraged. I didn't even stop to think," pharmacist Mark Akagi said.
Akagi grabbed a golf club he keeps behind the counter. "I started yelling obscenities at him. I was just screaming my head off at him, and that scared him out of here," he said.
Akagi chased him out the back door and through the parking lot to an adjacent shopping center and movie theater. "He was yelling, ‘I am calling my friend right now, and he will hurt your wife and daughter if you don't stop chasing me!'" Akagi said.
The pharmacist didn't have to stop chasing the robber, though, because he got winded and slowed down.
"I did catch up to him at that point. He stopped, cowered down like this. I suspected who it was," Akagi said. "I removed the hood off his face there, and it was the person we suspected."
Police say that man is 52-year-old James Roger Smith, who has been a regular customer at Southwood Pharmacy for the last two years.
Akagi escorted Smith back to the pharmacy where he was arrested by police. "He even pleaded with me to give him a couple of OxyContin on the way back," Akagi said.
"He admitted that he has an addiction to the narcotic, so that's why he's confessed to these robberies and admitted that's why he did this," Sandy Police Sgt. Victor Quezada said.
Smith was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail on two counts of robbery. There is no evidence the pharmacist's wife and daughter were ever in danger.
