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Anchorage police are seeking public help in identifying an armed man who robbed a Downtown Pizza Hut restaurant Thursday morning, in an incident similar to the robbery of a Midtown Subway restaurant a day earlier.
According to APD spokesperson Dani Myren, police were called to the Pizza Hut at 118 E. 6th Ave., just east of the Anchorage Museum, shortly after 9:30 a.m. Nobody was injured in the robbery.
Surveillance video recorded the suspect -- described by APD as a man about 25 years old with skin tone similar to that of a Latino or Pacific Islander, wearing a black hoodie, black skull cap and a dark scarf -- brandishing a handgun and demanding money from a female employee, who handed the man a bag of coins and fled to another employee in the kitchen.
“The suspect followed the employee to the kitchen where he discovered she had joined a second employee, at which point the suspect returned to the register and removed an undisclosed amount of cash,” Myren wrote in a Thursday statement on the case. “The suspect then fled the scene in a vehicle, the description of which is unknown at this time.”
The suspect and the methods resemble those reported in a robbery that took place at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Subway sandwich shop at 6110 Old Seward Hwy., where APD says a Hispanic male in his twenties brandished a handgun, demanding and receiving money from the till. A third robbery late Tuesday night, at a home on East 12th Avenue where a man was knocked out and had his handgun stolen, also involved a similar description of the suspect.
APD said Wednesday that any links between the two previous robberies were inconclusive, a position Myren repeated Thursday after the most recent case.
“There’s nothing conclusive to tie them together, but it’s something that we can’t rule out,” Myren said.
Anyone with information on the Pizza Hut robbery is asked to call APD at 786-8900 or Crimestoppers at 561-STOP.
Contact Chris Klint