Armed robbers posed as police officers to steal $49K from a family in Chester County, police say
Two gunmen, tipped off by the victim's uncle, fired multiple times into a family's minivan, hitting one victim in the chest and narrowly missing two others, police said.
A North Carolina family was driving home after visiting a relative in Germantown when, suddenly, a car behind them turned on red-and-blue emergency lights, signaling them to pull over.
The family patriarch, thinking it was police, complied. He had no idea, Chester County prosecutors said Monday, that the men following him were armed robbers working with his uncle to ambush and strong-arm him out of $49,000 his sister had given him.
The man narrowly survived that encounter with a bullet in his chest, while several other shots missed his wife and 3-year-old child’s heads by mere inches.
The three men who police say orchestrated that plot, Terrell Adams, 38, Roberto Morel, 51, and Tuften Green, 31, have all been charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy in the March 28 shooting along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Tredyffrin Township.
Adams, of East Germantown, and Morel, of Drexel Hill, remained in custody, denied bail. Morel, investigators said, is the uncle of the man who was driving the car and his sister, who gave the victim the money.
Green, the one police say shot the vehicle’s driver, remained on the run and was being sought by Pennsylvania State Police.
Investigators say the three suspects had been tailing the victims for about 20 miles, starting when they pulled away from their relative’s home in Germantown, according to the affidavit of probable cause for their arrests.
As the family was driving westbound on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they noticed a Chevrolet Suburban behind them had turned on a red-and-blue emergency light. The driver pulled over to the road’s shoulder as two men, dressed all in black, got out of the SUV and approached the car, the affidavit said. One man, later identified as Adams, was wearing a hat with “police” sewn into it.
Police later learned that Morel, driving in a separate car, pulled up to the scene behind the two other men, according to the affidavit.
Adams and Green asked the man and his wife for their driver’s licenses. The man’s wife, suspicious, asked them for their badge numbers and began to dial 911. Green, seeing this, pressed a 9mm gun to the woman’s side and attempted to grab her phone, the affidavit said.
As the man attempted to pull back onto the highway, Green fired his gun, striking him in his chest. Four additional shots were fired as the family’s minivan sped away, though no one else was struck, according to the affidavit.
State police, called to the scene by an off-duty officer who happened to be passing by, found the family less than a mile away. They took the driver to Paoli Hospital, where he was treated and released.
Investigators later learned that the man’s sister owns a bodega in Germantown and had given him the $49,000 to invest in his business back in North Carolina. The man said he had first seen the Suburban following him after leaving his sister’s block, and that it had briefly pulled alongside his car before merging back behind him, the affidavit said.
Through surveillance footage, detectives traced the Chevrolet Suburban’s movement both before and after the shooting, and found that it had arrived in Germantown 20 minutes before the victims left.
On April 1, officers stopped the car in Darby, while it was being driven by Green’s girlfriend. She told police Green had purchased it for her weeks earlier, and that when he drove it home, it had a temporary tag issued by the state of Maryland.
However, at the time of the car stop, the SUV had a temporary tag from Delaware.
Police found both tags were fraudulent, and said Green switched them regularly to avoid detection.
Cell phone data showed Green, Adams, and Morel had communicated with each other in the hours before the shooting, and traveled closely together. Surveillance footage taken from a gas station in Philadelphia showed all three men met up about a half-hour before they began to follow the victims, according to the affidavit.
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