October 10, 2008, 3:32 pm
Foggy Bottom Grocery robbed at gunpoint
Posted By Sarah Scire
Meseret Bekel, Foggy Bottom Grocery owner, speaks with police and neighbors on Friday afternoon. Tim Gowa/Hatchet staff photographer
Updated 6:54 p.m.: An infomail sent to the GW community this evening states that the man fled with about $512.
Original Post. A man robbed Foggy Bottom Grocery at gunpoint this afternoon, leaving the scene with an undetermined amount of money, police and witnesses said.
At about 1:35 p.m., a black male, described by witnesses as in his thirties, attached a note to the door reading “Be Back in 10 Minutes” before placing a handgun on the counter and demanding money, said Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant John Mitchell.
Police on the scene could not confirm whether the man had been arrested.
Jaime Molinelli, a veterinarian who lives in Baltimore, Md., said she heard the Foggy Bottom Grocery owner Meseret Bekel shouting from her shop’s door.
“I heard her screaming and I looked at him and said, ‘Hey, you!’ and he started running,” Molinelli said. “So I chased after him.”
Molinelli, the daughter of the late prominent Foggy Bottom residents Jimmy and Lucille Molinelli, said she chased the robber from Foggy Bottom Grocery’s location at 2140 F Street to 22nd street but stopped when a bystander told her the man was carrying a gun.
“I wasn’t going to catch him anyway,” Molinelli said.
Bekel sustained minor injuries but was otherwise unhurt, Mitchell said.
Kris Hart, an alumnus and owner of the nearby Relax Tanning salon, is in the process of buying the Foggy Bottom Grocery. He said Bekel, an Ethiopian immigrant in her sixties, was “shaken up.”
“It’s a terrible thing to happen to her,” said Hart, a former Student Association president. “She just doesn’t deserve it.”
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Posted by Sarah Scire
Categories: Newsroom
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