Bonnie and Clyde, they were not.
Three days after a jewelry store on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx was robbed, a man and a woman believed to be at the center of the brazen holdup were identified and in custody, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Wednesday.
“It was good investigative work,” Mr. Kelly said.
He said the trail that led to the capture of the two — Helen Lazo, 28, and Kevin Fisher, 43 — began in the moments after the Feb. 16 armed robbery, when the proprietor of Spinelli & Son Jewelers, at 2310 Arthur Avenue, fired two shots at his assailants.
One bullet fired by the proprietor, Anthony Spinelli, hit a leg of a man accused of acting as a lookout, Steven Hall, 43. But what detectives from the 48th Precinct did not immediately know was that Mr. Spinelli’s second bullet tore into Ms. Lazo’s right shoulder.
Mr. Kelly said detectives were now looking for a man they believe is a fourth member of the robbery crew: a getaway driver in his 30s who ferried Ms. Lazo and Mr. Fisher away in a gold Cadillac Escalade.
A man who answered the phone at the store on Wednesday, identifying himself as Mr. Spinelli’s lawyer, said he had advised his client not to discuss the matter. But then, unlike some of his neighbors, Mr. Spinelli, 49, who is not being charged in the shooting, has not gloated, strutted or said much in the week since the robbery.
“He is trying to get back to normalcy,” said the lawyer, who declined to provide his name. “But it’s not easy.”
The police said Mr. Hall, who was treated at St. Barnabas Hospital last week and charged with robbery, did not cooperate with investigators. But detectives learned through their computer databases that Ms. Lazo had used his address, on 213th Street in the Bronx, when she was arrested in October 2009 on a charge of shoplifting a necklace and two bracelets from a store on East 14th Street in Manhattan. She said then that she was Mr. Hall’s fiancée, the police said.
“They get her picture,” Mr. Kelly said. “They show her picture to the victim, in a photo array. She’s picked out.”
Detectives found Ms. Lazo on Friday, in front of her residence on East 105th Street in Manhattan; she had suffered a gunshot wound and “was administering her own first aid,” Mr. Kelly said. They took her to St. Barnabas; under questioning, she implicated herself in the jewelry store robbery, the authorities said, and she was charged with first-degree robbery, criminal possession of a weapon, menacing and other offenses.
Using other “investigative techniques,” Mr. Kelly said, detectives on Saturday identified another suspect, Mr. Fisher, who also lives on East 105th Street in Manhattan. They discovered that he had been arrested on Friday, in East Harlem, on unrelated charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance and marijuana, and was in custody at Rikers Island. Mr. Fisher is expected to be charged Thursday in the jewelry store robbery, Mr. Kelly said.
The capture of Ms. Lazo and Mr. Fisher was reported by The Daily News on Wednesday.
The getaway vehicle has not been found. Also missing is a second registered pistol of Mr. Spinelli’s, a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson stolen from his safe during the holdup.
The Legal Aid Society lawyer representing Ms. Lazo could not immediately be contacted. Martin Galvin, a lawyer for Mr. Hall, did not return a call for comment.
According to criminal complaints against Mr. Hall and Ms. Lazo, Mr. Spinelli had said the woman who robbed him first came in and engaged him in talk of jewelry. But then she suddenly grabbed him by his necktie, pulled his head to the counter, placed a gun to his head and said: “Give me all of your jewelry. Hurry up.”
He opened his safe and filled her shoulder bag with watches, bracelets, rings, pendants, cash and the 9-millimeter gun. Then she walked to the front of the store and took more jewelry from a display window — all while being watched from outside by Mr. Hall, the court papers said. Then the man and woman fled the store, joined Mr. Hall and headed south, the court papers said.
