- November 18, 2024
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He didn’t pull a weapon, or possess one. He never voiced a threat. But whenever 18-year-old Al’Kwazi Spencer fills in a job application that asks if he’s ever been charged with a crime, he’ll have to answer: “Yes. Robbery.”
Spencer, a former star football player at Matanzas High School who has been considering college ball options, says he was just tagging along March 28 when the two younger teenagers he was with said they were going to pick up a pizza.
“They told me to walk with them to get a pizza,” he said. “It was three of us. I was in the back.”
What happened next, according to a Sheriff’s Office report, was robbery: The teens crowded around 25-year-old delivery driver Crystal Torres’ car as she drove to deliver a pizza to 23 Farnum Lane. Torres, scared, asked them not to rob her, then “exited the vehicle and presented the pizza” and a box of chicken wings, according to an arrest affidavit. The teens took it and ran. Sheriff's Office Spokeswoman Paula Priester was not sure if one of the teens placed the delivery order for the pizza.
In a public post on her Facebook page, Torres called the robbery a “nightmare” and said deliveries since were nerve wracking.
According to the Torres’ statement to deputies, the teens didn’t voice a threat. But their body language was threatening, she said: One of the teens had a hand in his back pocket and she feared he might be armed.
That’s enough for a robbery charge.
“A lot of robbery situations are implied, or there’s an implied weapon,” Sheriff’s Office Spokesman Bob Weber said.
He gave an example: A robber walks up to someone, keeping a hand in his coat with his finger sticking against the fabric from the inside so it looks like a gun barrel. The gesture constitutes a threat of force.
Threatening someone — called “putting in fear” — changes a crime from larceny to robbery when something is stolen, and when deputies found Spencer and the other teens in a Farver Lane bedroom with the stolen pizza box in a closet and a bowl of discarded crusts on the table, they charged all three with robbery.
But the stakes are highest for Spencer, the oldest of the three and the only one charged as an adult.
Spencer said he didn’t know what the other teens were doing until it was done, and didn’t threaten the delivery driver — at least, not intentionally.
“I made one mistake in my life. One,” he said. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.”
Keith Lagocki, a former football coach at Matanzas High School, coached Spencer from his freshman year to his junior year. He called Spencer a “great kid” and said the incident is “definitely out of character for him.”
“I don’t recall him ever being in any trouble, academically or socially,” Lagocki said.
But Spencer’s mother, Connie Collins, said she’s afraid the robbery charge will take from him “something he’s already earned” by ruining his college prospects.
The future the young man has worked for could disappear with a conviction and possible prison sentence.
It will already be different than it would have been if he hadn’t approached that car on Farnum Lane.
But Collins said the family will go through the legal process, and try to move on.
“We’ve never been through this with any kind of behavioral problem. Never,” Collins said. “But we’ll put our trust in the judicial system, and let the chips fall where they may.”
