After confessing to the crime, an armed gang that used a stun gun to steal a group of American visitors in Chelsea of a £100,000 watch now faces prison time.
Just after midnight on November 16, Thomas Lenaghan, 23, and Ronnie Fitzgerald, 20, targeted three males walking on Pavilion Road while concealing their faces with balaclavas.
A stun gun was used to knock one of their victims, age 31, to the ground.
He was encircled when he was ordered to surrender his Rolex watch, which is estimated to be worth £10,000.
While attempting to halt the assault, his father was threatened with a knife, which sliced through his coat without injuring him.
Before the suspects got into a waiting vehicle and raced off, their buddy was also intimidated with a stun gun and had to take up her watch, which was worth around £200.
Londoners Lenaghan and Fitzgerald entered guilty pleas to conspiracy to rob, threatening a person in a public place with a bladed instrument, possessing a stun gun, and threatening a person with a stun gun yesterday at Isleworth Crown Court.
The three defendants will be sentenced on December 9 after John Stovell, 50, admitted to handling stolen property and providing assistance to an offender.
DC ‘This was a frightening and brutal robbery, which obviously left the victims shocked and feeling very lucky they did not suffer more severe injuries,’ said Robert Rodak, who worked on the investigation, outside.
We are doing all we can to remove criminals like Lenaghan, Fitzgerald, and Stovell from our streets because we believe that everyone should be free to stroll through our streets untouched by this kind of criminality.
This conviction came about as a consequence of a collaborative effort in which the Flying Squad’s specialized knowledge helped our local team find the criminals. Together, we will keep pursuing and targeting thieves who commit violent crimes in London.
Despite the incident being captured on CCTV and mobile devices, the perpetrators could not be identified since they had their faces covered and were dressed in plain clothes.
Their vehicle, a stolen Jaguar F-PACE with fictitious license plates, made it difficult to locate and identify them.
After attentively going through the video, detectives from the Met’s Flying Squad discovered that the automobile had a little sticker on the lower right corner of its windscreen.
The number of Jaguar F-PACEs reported stolen and not recovered in recent months was determined by searching criminal records; this left them with 30 to 40 potential automobiles.
The crew got in touch with each owner to see whether any of their automobiles had any distinctive distinguishing characteristics.
One reported to the police that their automobile had a parking permit for their child’s school, which was the same description as the sticker found on the getaway car.
The crew had been searching for a breakthrough, and this was it, revealing the actual “identity” of the automobile.
From there, they were able to determine the location of the automobile before and after the crime and look into more CCTV possibilities, which resulted in video showing the criminals meeting without masks.
Lenaghan, Stovell, and Fitzgerald were identified as a result of the widely disseminated images of their faces.
A forensic investigation connected the guys to the automobile when it was discovered in a parking lot on North End Road, SW6.
Kensington and Chelsea’s local police chief, Detective Chief Superintendent Owain Richards, said: “Over the last several months, we have concentrated our efforts in hot spot locations where we know watch robberies have grown.”
We hope that this case shows that anybody committing these offenses will be found and brought to justice. “Our devoted robbery squad are relentlessly chasing down individuals involved for these sort of crimes.”