Good Guy with a Gun #189: Horsham Township, PA
Jackhammer. Grinder. Crowbar. Sledgehammer. Two walls. Three stores. $250,000 in jewelry. There's a criminal who puts in the effort. | Original incident: May 8, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
You’ve got to wish these people could put this kind of effort into, you know, holding down a job.
“These people” consist of at least two people, but maybe more. I only have one name to go by: Timothy Overman.
I read Overman and I think of Nietzsche’s Übermensch — someone who refuses to be constrained by conventional morality. I have a term for people who aren’t constrained by morality: bad guy. With that in mind, let’s let Martin P. Desmond, the assistant prosecutor from Mahoning County, Ohio, describe Overman in his own words:
He’s a bad guy.
There you go. Also:
We don’t want him back on our streets.
Desmond had prosecuted Overman for two crimes. In 2004, he had killed Jason Gasior, Jr., after an argument about drugs or money; he pled to voluntary manslaughter. In 2005, he had robbed a restaurant of $2,000; he pled to armed robbery.
In 2007 he was sentenced to 15 years.
Then, in 2011, Overman was sentenced to 15 additional months for attempted possession of a deadly weapon under detention.
He should have gotten out of prison at the end of May, 2021.
Which leads us from an Ohio correctional facility to an eastern Pennsylvania shopping center where, three years later in the wee hours of May 8, 2024, Overman and a colleague broke a lock to get into a Massage Envy store in a mall.
Looking to steal Himalaya salt stones? No — they tore a hole in a wall to enter Waxing the City next door.
Looking to get their eyebrows done? No — they tried a few different tactics before breaking out into the hallway and then penetrating into Jems1 Jewels & Gold.
That’s ambition: Get up before 5 AM, break into a store two doors down from your target, and tunnel your way through infrastructure until you’ve reached your goal. They destroyed more before 5 AM than I do all day.
They commenced breaking display cases with crowbars and a sledgehammer, stuffing jewels into a black canvas bag. Then they cut into a safe using a jackhammer and a grinder equipped with a cutting wheel. In all, they grabbed about $250,000 worth of jewels.
One man walked out with an unspecified amount of jewelry. Overman was still inside. I still don’t know if there were others involved.
And then Scott Kelly, the owner, arrived. He’s a retired law enforcement officer, and he apparently came to investigate a problem with the security cameras.2 This wasn’t the first time that his store had been targeted, either.
Kelly and Overman got into a struggle, and Kelly was able to shoot him in the right arm.
Police arrived and arrested Overman, charging him with burglary and other crimes. He was held on a $1 million bail. No accomplices were ever caught.
Back in Ohio in 2017, assistant prosecutor Martin P. Desmond had been galled when Overman had requested leniency and early release, in part because — according to Overman’s attorney — he had “shown genuine remorse.” This kind of intense planning, effort, and apparent unwillingness to rat out your colleagues in crime shows Desmond’s distrust was well-placed.
Sources
Overman’s earlier crimes were documented by The Vindicator Printing Company.
CBS News Philadelphia did a great job of covering this story, with some good pictures and excellent television/video coverage that showed a lot of detail and got community reaction.
Action News 6, North Penn Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC 10, and Fox 29 all also did a good job. There was clearly a lot of interest in this story.
PA Living News wrote up the story and noted that there was a similar burglary just a month before in Toms River, New Jersey.
Patch and Philly Voice gave condensed versions of the story.
Specialist media
The only specialist media site I see reporting on this is the Jewelers Security Alliance.
Not a misspelling. At least, not on my part.
Vicky Lombardo from Waxing the City said that “They cut wires because I guess didn’t want anyone to be able to see the camera footage,” which led me to believe that they had cut the wires during the invasion. Deanna Durante from NBC 10 says specifically that the owner showed up because the wires were cut and there was a problem with the camera — all plausible. But the video at ABC 6 says that the store owner had reported the wires being cut several days before.