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Saddle Brook detectives investigating the Sept. 19 holdup at the Spencer Savings Bank in the Terra Mini Mall on Market Street were scouring area hotels when they found the getaway car — a four-door, gold 2000 Mazda Millenia — in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn off the Garden State Parkway in Rochelle Park, authorities said at the time.
Soon after, William Petrucelli II emerged from the lobby following an apparent visit and was arrested.
In his car, police said, they found a key to a South Hackensack hotel, where they recovered approximately $1,500 in cash, along with 300 or so heroin bags that Police Chief Robert Kugler said Petrucelli bought with the rest of the booty.
He later confessed during questioning, the chief said.
A witness earlier reported seeing Petrucelli — wearing a grey sweatshirt and dark shorts — run across the parking lot of the mini mall, get into a four-door, late-90s model gold-colored vehicle and drive off immediately after the robbery.
Detectives from the Bergen County Sheriff’s Bureau of Criminal Identification lifted a fingerprint matching Petrucelli’s from a demand note that he left behind, the chief said.
The note said he had a gun and instructed the teller to put the cash into a bag that he’d brought, Kugler said at the time.
Petrucelli, 25 (photo above), remained held on $100,000 bail in the Bergen County Jail.
The indictment returned yesterday charged Petrucelli with threatening “immediate bodily injury” to the female teller during a robbery in Saddle Brook, in addition to heroin and cocaine possession in South Hackensack.
MUGSHOT: Courtesy SADDLE BROOK PD
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