16 Mass. App. Ct. 970 | Mass. App. Ct. | 1983
The defendants appeal from their convictions of armed robbery and receiving a stolen motor vehicle. 1. At the voir dire there was evidence that the police officers who arrived at the scene of the robbery elicited from the two victims information that the robbery was perpetrated at about 8:00 p.m. by two men who made off with their purses; that the two men had driven up in a white Firebird or Camaro with a Massachusetts vehicle registration plate beginning “758”; that the driver was a white male with short black hair; that the other man, who left the car and confronted the victims, was black, brandished a knife, and wore a tan jacket with white coloring on the sleeves. There was evidence that the police officers broadcast these descriptions over the police radio and then drove the victims around in a police cruiser in an effort to locate the robbery vehicle; that two officers in another cruiser who had received the broadcast description a few minutes earlier saw three individuals, two black and one white, talking together on a sidewalk about two miles or less from the scene of the robbery; that the three made a sudden response (“their heads snapped”) to seeing the cruiser; that one of the two blacks, the defendant Benbow, wore a tan jacket with white on the sleeves; that the officers drove up on the sidewalk, asked the three what they were doing, pat-frisked Benbow, and found a knife; that, when the knife was found, the white man, the defendant Campos, fled and was pursued by one of the officers; that in the course of the chase Campos discarded various items (a credit card, traveler’s checks, a checkbook) bearing the names of the victims; that, when he received a broadcast of Campos’s apprehension with articles from the robbery, the officer who had remained with the two blacks placed them under arrest, searched them, and found on Benbow’s person a cigarette case, later identified by one of the victims as the one which had been in her purse, and a popped automobile ignition; that when the victims arrived in the cruiser they both identified Benbow as the robber who had confronted them with the knife; that it was then about twenty or twenty-five minutes after the robbery; that the police then found a white Camaro with a Massachusetts vehicle registration plate, the first three numbers of which were “758,” parked behind a dumpster about twenty feet from where the three men had been found in conversation; that the ignition of the Camaro had been popped; and that the popped ignition found on Benbow’s person fitted the Camaro. On this evidence the judge did not err in ruling that the stop and frisk, the later search of Ben-bow and the identifications by the victims were lawful. The broadcast description of the robbers — particularly the jacket worn by Ben-
Judgments affirmed.