By JOSEPH KELLARD
Breen said he assumed the man was running to catch a bus, but later learned he was running from the law, having allegedly just robbed the Bank of America at the corner of Long Beach and Warwick roads. And with the help of Breen's coordination with police and some convincing acting by driver Bob DeMinico, two officers arrested Marc Gumpert, 35, of Woodmere a short while later at a local motel.
Gumpert is accused of passing a note demanding money to a teller at the bank, leaving with $3,630 in cash by way of the back door, and approaching a customer in the parking lot and demanding his car keys, which the customer refused to relinquish, at 11:05 a.m. on July 6.
Breen was working a 5 a.m.-to-5 p.m. shift at McRides when, from the dispatcher's booth, he said he saw a man tearing down the street. "I saw him running at 100 miles an hour with a bad look on his face and clutching something in his hand," Breen said. "He was zig-zagging down the middle of the street like he didn't know where he was going."
At about 11:15, a police officer stuck his head in the dispatcher's booth and asked Breen if he'd seen anyone suspicious. Breen gave him a full head-to-toe description of the man he had just seen running southbound, describing him as of medium height and muscular. DeMinico was also present, and Breen described to him the man he saw.
Then, at 11:34, Breen got a call from a man asking for a round trip ride from the Plantation Motel, at the north end of Long Beach Road in Island Park, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge on Park Avenue in Long Beach. "He hung up and then called me back a couple of minutes later and again said he needed a ride to the VFW," Breen said.
DeMinico was dispatched to the Plantation. The driver radioed back to Breen that the man approaching his taxi from a room of the motel fit the description of the man he saw running down the street.
"I then told Bob to stall him so I could call the police," Breen explained. With Gumpert in his back seat, DeMinico drove up to the motel office, got out and went inside and pretended to stretch and talk to the desk clerk. "The robber was telling him, 'Let's go, let's go,'" Breen said.
Meanwhile, special operations officers Frank Leckler and Kevin Luscher were searching for the suspect on the train tracks near the motel. At that time, another police officer had returned to the dispatcher's booth, and on Breen's tip the officer radioed other officers to head to the Plantation.
Leckler and Luscher arrested Gumpert as he got out of the taxi at the motel. He was charged with third-degree robbery for the bank heist and second-degree robbery for the attempted carjacking. Gumpert was transported to Nassau University Medical Center for an unrelated previous medical condition.
"I could have gotten shot," DeMinico said in an interview with a local news channel later that day.
Detective Gary Schriffen of the Robbery Squad said that Gumpert was unarmed when arrested. "But he did say to the operator of the vehicle [at the bank] that he had a gun, and he made motion that he had a gun to get the man's keys in his car," Schriffen said.
Asked why Gumpert requested a ride to the VFW, Schriffen said, "I don't believe the VFW was a specific location he wanted, I think it was just a landmark in Long Beach that he wanted to go to. Why? We don't know."
Schriffen said that Gumpert has previously been arrested for burglary and grand larceny. "It's a beautiful thing that we caught him," Breen said about his and DeMinico's part in capturing Gumpert. "He wasn't too bright."
"They did a very fine job for us," Schriffen said about Breen and DeMinico, "and it was good that the driver was armed with the information about the bank robbery and the specific description, the height and weight of the suspect, based on our officers doing a canvas of the area and speaking to the dispatcher to bring out the original information."
Larry Blessinger, owner of McRides, said, "I think it was a courageous effort for the driver to put his life on the line to get a criminal caught. It was a great effort on both Bob's and Jeremiah's part."
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