E: A Bronx man who police said threatened to kill a convenience store employee with a box cutter when an Elmwood Park police officer interrupted a robbery was indicted on several charges.
“It could have gone in a very different direction,” Elmwood Park Police Chief Michael Foligno said after Officer Michael Goldyn stopped the September 4 holdup.
Goldyn knew something was wrong as he drove past the 7-Eleven at the corner of Market Street and Boulevard before dawn and spotted a store clerk and two strangers near the front entrance.
The employee “made eye contact with him as the officer went by,” Foligno said, so the officer turned his cruiser around.
The would-be robbers were pushing the clerk inside and trying to close the door as Goldyn approached, the chief said.
That’s when 30-year-old defendant Angel Caban “became extremely agitated and began threatening to kill the employee in front of the officer,” he said.
The clerk told Goldyn that both men were upset because he refused to let them used expired coupons. Both punched him, he said, and Caban attacked him with a box cutter, he said.
Goldyn summoned backup, took both into custody and found them carrying merchandise stolen from the store, Foligno said.
Caban later assaulted another officer while being fingerprinted and photographed at police headquarters and had to be restrained, he said.
Caban was being held on $200,000 bail — down from an original $300,000 — in the Bergen County Jail.
An indictment returned by a grand jury in Hackensack yesterday charges him with armed robbery, two counts of illegal weapons possession, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, threatening to kill and threatening physical force of violence to try and prevent police from making an arrest.