Man sentenced for stealing pills

Felix Garcia found guilty of felony robbery for theft of thousands of opioid tablets from Walgreen’s in East Bradford

WEST CHESTER >> A man who West Chester police investigators had been able to identify as the person who robbed an East Bradford pharmacy of almost 2,700 Oxycodone and OxyContin pills has been sentenced to state prison for the crime which he maintained he did not commit.

Felix “Danny” Garcia, a New Jersey native who told police he worked for The Vanguard Group as a client representative when he was arrested, will serve a threeto seven-year term for felony robbery, plus an additional one year of probation for drug possession charges.

The sentence was handed down March 13 by Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Sarcione, who had overseen the December trial at which Garcia, who lived in West Chester a few blocks from the pharmacy at the time of the robbery, was found guilty by a jury.

Although the jury was shown video footage of the man who robbed the Walgreen’s Pharmacy at the Bradford Plaza Shopping Center that prosecutor Cynthia Morgan argued was unmistakably Garcia, the suspect had maintained throughout that he was a victim of mistaken identity.

In an interview after his arrest with West Chester Detective John DiBattista during which Garcia was shown the footage, he denied that the man seen was him. “I’m being framed,” he insisted.

“I have a good job,” he told the detective, who countered that the suspect seen in the video was distinctly Garcia, mostly because of

a singular way he walked. “I come from a good family. That’s not me. That’s not me. Why would I rob something?”

The jury disagreed, siding with Morgan and the borough police.

Garcia’s attorney, Stephen Kelly of Kennett Square, had asked Sarcione to grant his client some leniency, keeping is sentence within the lower range of the state sentencing guidelines for robbery. But the judge accepted Morgan’s recommendation. The theft of the 2,694 pills meant that Garcia was not going to use them for himself, but rather to sell to others.

Garcia, 28, of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, was supported at the sentencing proceeding by his girlfriend, a sister, and his mother. He has been in Chester County Prison since Dec. 16, the date of the jury’s guilty verdict. He will remain there for a month while Kelly files a motion to withdraw from the case and then be transferred to a State Correctional Institution to begin serving his sentence.

According to court records and a criminal complaint filed by lead investigator Detective Robert Kuehn, Walgreen’s pharmacist Sheila Rodriguez, told police she was the only pharmacy employee on duty the evening of Sept. 9, 2015 when a man she did not know approached the store wearing a hooded sweatshirt. It was her second day on the job at the Walgreens on North Bradford Avenue, just outside the borough.

“A gentleman jumped over the counter,” Rodriguez said, “and asked me to get down (on the floor). I got down like he asked me to, because I was afraid that I could be hurt.” She said the man told her that if she screamed he would, “take out his gun,” although she said she never saw a weapon of any kind.

Rodriguez said that the

man demanded to know where the “Oxy pills” were kept, and she said they were in the safe. He made her take him there, and unloaded the safe of all the bottles containing the narcotics, stuffing them in a bag he brought with him. He then took off his hooded sweatshirt and rapped it around the bag.

The pharmacist said the man asked her where the back door was, but that she did not know, so he made her lead him out of the pharmacy room and he left through the front door.

Kuehn, in his complaint, said he had received copies of surveillance tapes from the Walgreens as well as a nearby Giant Food Store the suspect had visited prior to the robbery. Images from those tapes were used to develop a photo that was distributed to the news media, and after seeing it, an anonymous caller identified the man as Garcia, who was said to live nearby. Another confidential informant also confirmed that the man they knew as Garcia was the man in the photo.

Police searched for a car that they believed was used in the robbery, and found it parked outside an apartment on North Brandywine Street, just a few blocks from the Walgreens. They spotted Garcia entering the car, and used information to work up a recent photo of him that they compared to the surveillance footage.

DiBattista testified at a preliminary hearing that he had interviewed Garcia after his arrest, and that the defendant had told him he did not use Oxycontin or Oxycodone. He said that based on the number of pills that Garcia had allegedly taken, it was his opinion as a narcotics investigators that he would be using them to sell, rather than for his own use.

The jury found him not guilty of the possession with intent to deliver charge Garcia was charged with. The pills have not been recovered, and Garcia was ordered to pay the Walgreen’s $5,000 in restitution.