A bystander and a suspect exchanged gunfire on Tuesday morning after a postal worker was the target of an armed robbery.
In River Grove, a suburb of Chicago, cops discovered that a man with a gun had approached a mail carrier and demanded his keys.
The letter carrier did what they asked and wasn’t hurt, but a nearby neighbor who had seen what happened pulled out his gun before the suspects got away. The bystander and robber exchanged shots, but no one got hit in the crossfire.
River Grove police said, “Words and gunshots were exchanged.”
NBC News said that according to police, “the male suspect ran back to the vehicle that dropped him off, and the vehicle fled north on River Road.”
According to NBC Chicago, a mother, and her daughters took the postal worker in. “My mom let the mailman inside our house to see if he was okay, because she talks to him regularly. He always comes around here.”
One daughter said, “He was just very distressed, very scared. You could tell he was very nervous from what had just happened.” “We kind of just kept him inside until the police got there and were ready to talk to him.”
The older daughter said, “I heard like a bang, bang, and bang, bang, bang, bang, then my mom screams, ‘tell me those weren’t gunshots.”
Another resident told WGN, “That wasn’t fireworks. That was gunfire.”
Authorities are offering a $50K reward for information about the robbery of the mail carrier.
Attacks on mail carriers have increased recently and often occur because robbers want the mail carriers’ master keys to gain access to and rob mailboxes.
A U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) representative said there could have been as many as four criminals involved.
Four against one isn’t good odds, but fortunately for the good samaritan, things went his way. River Grove is known as the village of friendly neighbors, and this is one neighbor you can depend on.
Glad the Good Samaritan was not charged, at least the article didn’t say so. In DuPage County he probably would have been.