Two men were taken into custody after being accused of following an ATM maintenance worker before shooting him and stealing a safe full of cash, police said.
Officers responded to a report of a carjacking at a Memphis supermarket on May 17, according to an arrest affidavit from the Memphis Police Department.
When they arrived, they found an ATM service man with a gunshot wound who told officers he had been assaulted leaving the supermarket after working on their ATM machine.
The man told officers two men approached him near his vehicle and attacked him before shooting him in the back, according to the affidavit.
The thieves took off in the maintenance man’s car, with a safe containing $120,000 in cash from previous ATMs inside, police said.
Surveillance footage showed two other vehicles circling the supermarket in the minutes leading up to the carjacking and speeding away from the area immediately after, according to the affidavit.
Investigators received additional footage on May 18 that showed one of the vehicles, a red Honda Accord, following the ATM maintenance man as he drove from one business to another working on machines, police said.
At one point, a man got out of the vehicle and followed the worker into the business, taking a phone call inside before leaving again, according to the affidavit.
Police said they later found the two vehicles that had circled the supermarket parked together at a house in Frayser. A man there was wearing the same clothes as the suspects in the surveillance video and the vehicles matched, police said.
When police found the ATM worker’s vehicle, the safe inside was gone, but it was later recovered by officers with its entire contents inside, police said.
The driver of the red Honda, 28-year-old Alvin Anthony, and the driver of the second vehicle, 30-year-old Royce Newsome, were taken into custody and charged with attempted first-degree murder, carjacking, use of a firearm in a dangerous felony, aggravated robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery, according to arrest records.
Newsome was also charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, records show, and Anthony was charged with tampering of evidence.
Their bonds were set at $95,000 and $85,000, respectively.
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