Man and woman with guns rob couple in golf community, head straight to stores

A man and woman who robbed a northwest Macon couple at gunpoint wasted no time trying to use a stolen debit card.

The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office released surveillance images Wednesday afternoon of the suspects in the robbery at a Macon golf club community.

Just after 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, a Barrington Hall woman got out of her car to face a couple with guns at her home on Laurel Place, not far from the entrance to the neighborhood off Zebulon Road.

The 57-year-old woman was in her garage when a black man with a pump-action shotgun and black woman with a semi-automatic pistol walked up and demanded her money and bank card, according to a news release from the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

The woman’s husband, 57, stepped out of the house and he was forced to lie on the ground with his wife.

The robbers took an undisclosed amount of money and the bank card, and left in a dark-colored car with loud mufflers.

Investigators have tracked the pair to stores on nearby Zebulon Road where they went to use the stolen debit card, the news release stated.

The male gunman was described as being about 6 feet tall, clean shaven, with a slender build, brown eyes and wearing all black clothes and a grayish-blue, zippered hoodie.

The female with the pistol, also was about 6 feet tall and very slender. She was wearing a gray scarf, black skinny jeans, a black hoodie and black shoes.

More details of the episode were noted in a sheriff’s report that was made available to reporters Wednesday afternoon.

The female suspect was said to be carrying what the robbery victim’s husband described as an Uzi with an extended magazine.

The woman who was being robbed said that at first she thought someone was playing a prank on her.

The sheriff’s report noted that she had stopped by a liquor store on Zebulon Road and gone to a nearby gas station before driving home. Deputies asked her if she may have been followed home, but she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t noticed a car parked on the street near her house when she drove up.

The sheriff’s report said that when she was first approached by the robbers, the male suspect asked to see her driver’s license.

At that point, the report noted, “the male suspect became nicer. Prior to seeing the license, (the) male suspect was very intimidating, but after looking at the license he became ... calmer and told her that they are not here to ... hurt her in any way. ... (The gunman) demanded that she give him all the cash that she had. She then figured out that this was really happening and that it was not a prank and that she was really getting robbed.”

The woman handed over $80 from her wallet, and when the gunman wanted more, she said she didn’t carry much cash. That’s when her husband stepped into the garage to see “what the commotion was about,” the report said.

“The male suspect was startled by the fact that (the husband)” had appeared, the report went on. The female bandit, who as “acting very nervous,” aimed her gun at the husband and told him to look at the ground.

The gunman, however, kept his cool, the report added, and he reassured the husband and wife that “they were not going to hurt them,” but that they also needed to cooperate because, as one of the bandits put it, “We know where you live.”

The husband and wife later told authorities that they didn’t recognize the robbers.

The gunman rifled through the wife’s purse and took out her Capital City Bank debit card, the report said. The gunman made the wife tell him her personal identification number. She told him, and he also looked at a debit card that belongs to the woman’s son, who is in college.

She told the gunman that it was all the money her son has and that her son is away at school. The gunman, according to the sheriff’s report, looked at her and said “he respected that” and he didn’t take the son’s card.

Investigators traced activity on the woman’s debit card and found that the robbers had already, by 6:47 p.m., taken $502 from an ATM at Capital City Bank on Zebulon Road, and that they had also bought items at the Kroger on Zebulon and at a Wal-Mart across the street.

Anyone with information about the robbery was asked to call Bibb County deputies at 478-751-7500 or Macon Regional Crimestoppers at 877-68-CRIME.

This story was originally published January 11, 2017 at 1:44 PM with the headline "Man and woman with guns rob couple in golf community, head straight to stores."