Cops Collar Wrong Guy

BROOKSVILLE - On Monday a man walked up to the front counter of a gas station and lifted his shirt to display a gun butt tucked into his waist.

"Give me the ... money," he told the clerk.

She did so.

The robber left.

Deputies arrived and set up a crime scene. They were rewarded with a handprint lifted from a piece of paper attached to the door. Apparently the robber had pushed on it as he left the Sunoco on the corner of Barclay Avenue and Cortez Boulevard.

The print was run through the national fingerprint database. It returned several names, including 19-year-old Joseph Caggiano's. The clerk picked his photo out of six others and investigators made their arrest.

But Caggiano wasn't the robber.

"It was a close, but mistaken, identity," Chief Deputy Michael Hensley said Thursday.

The Sunoco armed robbery was one of four since Dec. 12 that followed the same pattern.

Wednesday night was the fourth at Spring Hill Lock and Key; Caggiano was arrested at 10 a.m. that morning. But though the modus operandi at Spring Hill Lock and Key matched previous robberies, it was still too early to dismiss Caggiano as a suspect.

Meanwhile, detectives were tracking down a stolen credit card linked to the robbery of the Simply Natural Salon on Tuesday. The card's history showed it was used that night at the Wal-Mart on U.S. 19 then denied at the Lollipops nightclub in Pasco County.

The detectives paid a visit to the club Wednesday night to see if there was surveillance video of the suspect. Turns out, there was something even better.

Hensley said the man who had attempted to use the card, 23-year-old Timothy Gartner, was still at the club. Detectives looked through the window of his car, which turned out to be stolen from Flammer Ford, and saw the Gucci purse grabbed from the spa and a realistic air-soft handgun, according to Hensley.

Pasco deputies were called in to arrest Gartner, but when they put the cuffs on he displayed seizure-like symptoms that required hospitalization. He's under guard now in Bayonet Point, but will be charged in Pasco for grand theft and possession of stolen property.

Caggiano wasn't completely in the clear yet. He had opted to retain a lawyer instead of talking, so the lead detective, Philip Lakin, put in a phone call to Caggiano's attorney, Jimmy Brown.

With Brown's approval, Lakin interviewed his suspect and learned Caggiano had been in the Sunoco about five hours before the robbery. The piece of paper he touched on his way out had been put on the door 10 minutes before his arrival.

Caggiano is a regular at the store, so it's likely that the clerk picked him out of the pack because he was a familiar face, Brown said.

Lakin reviewed the surveillance tape again and it corroborated Caggiano's story.

Even as detectives were working to free their original suspect, the case was mounting against Gartner. Deputies were given permission to search his house on London Drive and found five key chains stolen from Spring Hill Lock and Key, according to Hensley.

The same Sunoco footage that damned Caggiano also linked Gartner to the robbery, Hensley said.

The first robbery of a Metro PCS store remains unsolved.

Caggiano woke up Thursday morning in the Hernando County jail. His only chance of getting out was if his family managed to pay a $500,000 bond.

A family member was in the lobby of the jail to post the bond when a sheriff's detective interrupted him. Caggiano was to be released on his own recognizance in advance of prosecutors dropping the charge.

"The family is ecstatic" Brown said. They were adamant from the beginning that Caggiano was not responsible and "their faith in Joseph has been vindicated."

Brown felt the 24-hour ordeal was well handled by the sheriff's office and the state attorney's office.

"They should work just as hard to protect the innocent as the guilty," he said.