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“It could have gone in a very different direction,” Elmwood Park Police Chief Michael Foligno said after Officer Michael Goldyn stopped the Sept. 4 holdup.
Goldyn knew something was wrong as he drove past the 7-Eleven at the corner of Market Street and Boulevard before dawn and spotted a store clerk and two strangers near the front entrance.
Officer Michael Goldyn
The employee “made eye contact with him as the officer went by,” Foligno told CLIFFVIEW PILOT, so the officer turned his cruiser around.
The would-be robbers were pushing the clerk inside and trying to close the door as Goldyn approached, the chief said.
That’s when 30-year-old defendant Angel Caban (above, left) “became extremely agitated and began threatening to kill the employee in front of the officer,” he said.
The clerk told Goldyn that both men were upset because he refused to let them used expired coupons. Both punched him, he said, and Caban attacked him with a box cutter, he said.
Goldyn summoned backup, took both into custody and found them carrying merchandise stolen from the store, Foligno said.
Caban later assaulted another officer while being fingerprinted and photographed at police headquarters and had to be restrained, he said.
Caban was being held on $200,000 bail — down from an original $300,000 — in the Bergen County Jail.
An indictment returned by a grand jury in Hackensack yesterday charges him with armed robbery, two counts of illegal weapons possession, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, threatening to kill and threatening physical force of violence to try and prevent police from making an arrest.
The second man, 43-year-old John Carl Collmer Jr. of Lebanon, TN, was indicted on armed robbery charges. He remained held on $50,000 bail in the county lockup.
The clerk was unharmed.
“Officer Michael Goldyn did an outstanding job of preventing a potential tragedy by alert and proactive police work,” Foligno said at the time. “[It was] old-fashioned police work at its best.
“He remained composed and brought the incident to a safe conclusion,” the chief said.
MUGSHOTS: Courtesy BERGEN COUNTY SHERIFF
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