REDWOOD CITY – Authorities on Tuesday arrested three men in connection with a pair of convenience store robberies in Redwood City.
The first robbery was reported around 1 a.m. at the 7-Eleven located at Fifth Avenue and Bay Road, the Redwood City Police Department said in a news release.
Twenty minutes later, police received word of a second robbery at the 7-Eleven at 400 El Camino Real.
Police said the victims provided similar descriptions of the suspects. Meanwhile, a police dispatcher tracked down a bulletin for a recent robbery in Martinez that appeared to involve the same suspects. The bulletin included a description of their vehicle.
The vehicle was detected by the city’s recently installed automated license plate reader system, police said.
Around 1:40 a.m., an officer spotted the suspects outside a Denny’s at Broadway and Woodside Road. The suspects were all wearing ski masks and walking toward the restaurant, police said, adding that they were “apparently about to commit another robbery.”
The suspects spotted the officer and took off running in different directions, police said. Officers captured two of them a short time later and recovered a pair of guns.
The last suspect was found hiding in the vehicle around 2:30 a.m. in the 900 block of Charter Street. Police said a third gun was recovered.
The suspects – identified as a 30-year-old Vallejo man, a 23-year-old San Francisco man and a 19-year-old Fairfield man – were arrested and booked into the Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City on charges including armed robbery.