By Jeff Lipton and Nicole Falco
The teenager, who started work at Staples on Sunrise Highway in Valley Stream on March 6, was one of 12 employees taken hostage by three men in a robbery that turned sour during an eight-hour siege which ended peacefully early the next morning.
MacKenzie, 17, an honors student and former football player and wrestler at Lynbrook H.S., used a combination of guts and guile to escape along with six employees during the early hours of the siege. Five others were rescued by police.
Five suspects were arrested following the standoff.
Hostage siege begins
The armed robbers apparently hid in the store shortly before closing time at 9 p.m. Kyle went upstairs to get his stuff at about 9:40 p.m. and when he came back down, he was greeted by a gunman wearing a red and yellow bandanna around his mouth, he said. The suspect rounded up the employees near the registers. A second group of five employees was held captive in the basement.
He started messing with us. He pressed his gun in peoples' faces. He put his gun behind my neck, Kyle said of the robber.
Then, he said, a second gunman led them to the furniture section and ordered them to lie face down. The gunman produced a set of keys and demanded that one employee open the back door without sounding the alarm or he would kill her. She said she couldn't do it without sounding the alarm.
When the gunmen went back downstairs, I decided I would be the one to open the door, Kyle said, adding that the robbers had left the keys in the door.
We really needed to do something, we really needed to get out of there. I didn't want to wait to die, the Hewlett Harbor teenager said.
I didn't think I was going to die till I had the gun pointed to my head.
The seven walked out of the store shortly before 1 a.m. As a precaution, police pushed guns in their backs, handcuffed them, read them their rights and questioned them until 3:30 a.m., Kyle said.
Cops receive call
Police were summoned to the store by a call from one of the employees inside. Special Operations and Emergency Services units were called in by the first-arriving police officers.
While a negotiating team and a phalanx of heavily-armed special ops officers assembled, employees sought hiding places throughout the store. The manager, it was later learned, had been struck and thrown down a flight of stairs to the basement.
Police were assisted in enabling the hostages' release through on-going cell-phone conversations with some of the employees and special surveillance equipment. Police arrested one of the alleged robbery team in a car outside Staples as she gave warnings to her confederates inside with a two-way radio. She provided names and descriptions of the three men, police said.
While Kyle and six employees escaped at about 1 a.m., the others were freed around 3 a.m. after two entries were made by a dozen or so black-clad, helmeted officers.
Seven hostages who escaped were brought to the American Legion hall. The police debriefed them, in an effort to learn how many hostages were inside and their location as well as the location of the suspects. While this was going on, the police officers were talking to the hostages down in the basement on cell phones.
One of the suspects was arrested when he tried to leave the building masquerading as a shopper. The remaining two were apprehended inside by police using a stun grenade and chemical agents at about 6 a.m.
No shots were fired during the entire crisis.
All five suspects are from Brooklyn. Arrested were Kevin E. Grant, 23, and Danita G. Brown, 22, both of Prospect Place, who said they were security guards at JFK Airport parking lots.; Damion Taylor, 18, of East 105th Street; Kevin Affoon, 23 of East 37th Street; and Clement E. Benedict, 21, of Howard Avenue, an ex-employee who supplied the other suspects with logistical information about the location of the safe, money, alarm system and a complete diagram of the store, police said.
Benedict was charged with criminal facilitation and conspiracy in the fourth degree; Grant, Taylor and Affoon were each charged with two counts of robbery in the first degree, two counts of robbery in the second degree and one count each of burglary in the second degree, kidnapping in the second degree and criminal use of a firearm in the first degree. Brown was charged with the same except for the kidnapping charge, police said. The three suspects who took the hostages captive were armed with a pellet gun that looked like a 45-caliber pistol, an unloaded 38-caliber automatic handgun a collapsible baton and pepper spray.
We are very pleased and proud with the outcome of this case, said Nassau County Police Chief of Department Raymond Crawford on Thursday, which began as a serious crime, transpired for many hours during which it could have evolved into a much more serious incident with potential loss of life. The police officers who were there showed great courage, great skill and great expertise, [and] this case was resolved with minimal injury and no loss of life.
Crawford also commended the victims themselves for their actions.
Those victims, under great duress, at high risk for hours, communicated calmly to us.... They were able to provide us
