No Butts About It, It Was a Bad Day for Theft

Daniel McCoy must have wanted a cigarette badly.

To get one, he reportedly took on a .38-caliber pistol, baseball bat, stun gun, angry market owner and persistent if unsuccessful clerk at a North Park market.

All, apparently, for some good smokes. And he didn’t even get that.

He was under police guard Sunday night at Mercy Hospital, where he is under arrest on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

Police said McCoy entered the Rigel Meat Co. market at 2145 Fern St. about 11:40 a.m. Sunday and stuffed two cartons of cigarettes into his pants.

“He’d been in a few times before” and acted suspiciously, said Virginia Sawaya, 18, who was working the front counter of the store.

Sawaya said McCoy denied having the cigarettes in his pants when she confronted him, but that, when she pulled up his shirt, the cartons were visible.

Her father, Paul, 56, who had run his store at the same site for 14 years without a robbery, came over and told McCoy to walk to a back room to wait while he called police, Sawaya said.

“But he wouldn’t go. He got violent, you know, and my father tried to push him a little toward the back room,” she said.

When McCoy kept resisting, Sawaya said, her father pulled out his “.38 special” and cocked the hammer, while she grabbed a stun gun from behind the counter as customers fled the store.

“He wouldn’t stop fighting, you know, pushing my father, so I tried five times (jabbing him with the electrical stun device), but it didn’t have any effect--and it was working, too,” Sawaya said.

She said McCoy grabbed the stun gun and tried to stun her with it, but she grabbed it back.

Undeterred, she said, she picked up a baseball bat from behind the counter.

“Then he grabbed a glass jar (of pickles) and threatened to hurt my father. We yelled stop--we kept yelling for him to stop--but he was wild,” Sawaya said.

She said she swung the bat at McCoy, but he wrestled it away and swung at her.

“And, when he tried to swing at my father, that’s when he shot him, once, in the groin. . . . He fell to the floor, then got up and ran out of the store,” she said.

The Sawayas called the police. Officers found McCoy limping nearby along Grape Street.

He said a man in a passing car had shot him for no apparent reason. Sawaya said she went to the hospital and identified McCoy to police as the determined cigarette lover.

McCoy was listed in fair condition Sunday.

Sawaya said she was not hurt. Her father’s neck was bruised. The entire incident took less than five minutes.

Police said they will seek to have McCoy charged with assault with a deadly weapon.