Store owner routs 4 robbers with his revolver

Originally ran here as:
"Convenience store owner exchanges gunfire with robbers 
One suspect may have been wounded, in hospital"
By ANDI ATWATER, News-Press.com

April 30, 2001

When Adnan Asad and his wife, Wafa, left Miami six months ago for a “quieter life” in Fort Myers, little did they know they’d end up in a shoot-out with armed robbers.

But at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, 15 minutes before closing, Asad said four masked men entered his 724 Ortiz Ave. convenience store and held a gun to his wife’s head.

She screamed.

“I was filling up the cooler, and I hear too much noise so I go to look at the front of my store,” Asad, 54, said Sunday. “They held my wife, choked her in the neck and put a gun between her eyes.”

Asad, who opened Penny Saver Supermarket about two months ago, said the gunmen saw him and shot at him with a machine-gun type of weapon.

“They fired at me. They wanted to kill me,” he said.

Asad fired back with a .357-caliber handgun he keeps in his pocket. He fired in the air at first, and then at the robbers, he said.

“I tried to avoid shooting at them, but this guy keeps shooting at me,” he said. “I think somebody got hit.”

Fort Myers police say that may be the case. While investigating the robbery, police got word that a man with gunshot wounds had been dropped off at Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center.

Investigators haven’t been able to interview Harvey Evans, 28, of Fort Myers, but police say he may be a suspect. Evans was listed in critical condition Sunday night.

“We can’t say for sure whether he was involved in the robbery,” police spokeswoman Kara Winton said. “We’re waiting to talk to him.”

Meanwhile, Asad and his wife refuse to be daunted by the violence.

Although Saturday’s robbery was the second one there in two months, Asad insists that the criminals are just a few bad seeds.

“The community is very good, all the people are very good — family people,” Asad said. “The problem is three or four junkie guys. They don’t want to work, they want to keep robbing.”

Anyone with information about this crime should call police at 334-4155 or anonymously to Crimestoppers at 332-5555.

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