Police: Men Stuck Up West Rogers Park Bakers Square
UPDATED 12/28/10 1:53 p.m.
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Two men are charged with robbing a busy Bakers Square restaurant in the West Rogers Park neighborhood, and police believe they might be responsible for more robberies.
Eugene Wright, 37, and Michael Morgan, 27, are each charged with felony armed robbery in a holdup at the Bakers Square restaurant at 7131 N. Western Ave., just south of Touhy Avenue.
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Tactical officers from the Rogers Park police district were monitoring the Bakers Square after learning of robberies of other restaurants. They saw Morgan and Wright running from the restaurant and looking around suspiciously around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, police said.
At first, officers just stopped to interview the men, but shortly afterward, a report was broadcast that a holdup alarm had gone off inside the restaurant, police said. Police chased Morgan and arrested him after he allegedly briefly resisted and slightly injured the officers.
Wright was arrested a short time afterward, after police noticed a black conversion van that looked like one used in an earlier robbery, police said. Police pulled over the van at Western Avenue and Pratt Boulevard about half a mile south of the crime scene, and Wright was arrested without incident.
Police later determined that Wright and Morgan were also the culprits in the armed robbery of another Bakers Square, at Foster and Harlem avenues on the city's Far Northwest Side.
That robbery happened just before midnight on Dec. 11, police said. Two robbers forced two employees to open a safe in the back of the restaurant, then put them in a cooler before fleeing.
One of the employees activated the silent alarm before being placed into the cooler and police arrived shortly after the robbery, police said.
The robbers made away with about $3,000 from the safe in the earlier incident, police said.
Morgan lives in the 10600 block of South Racine Avenue, while Wright lives in the 6300 block of South Sangamon Street, police said. Both were set to appear in Central Bond Court (Br. 1) at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse Tuesday, but their bond information was not immediately available.
The Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report.
