Husband and wife show quick thinking, no mercy as pawnshop robbery goes very badly.

The owners of the Ginpoudou pawnshop in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, have a lot of cats. There’s even an illustration of a cat, wearing a loupe/jeweler’s lens and examining a ring, painted on the front of the store.

So when the 63-year-old owner, who lives on the building’s second floor, heard noises coming from downstairs a little after 2 in the morning on May 16, he figured some of his feline friends were having a spat of some kind. When he went to check on what exactly was going on, though, he discovered that two men were robbing the place, forcibly raising the storefront shutter and smashing their way through the glass door with a crowbar, then stuffing items from the showcase into a sack.

Grabbing a golf club, the owner confronted the pair, chasing them as they retreated to their car, which they’d parked out front. “I couldn’t let them get away, so I gave them a bit of a fight,” says the owner, but he wasn’t just swinging at the robbers, but at the windshield of their getaway vehicle. “I started hitting the windshield so it would crack and they wouldn’t be able to see out of it. I also squared off against the guy with the crowbar.”

▼ Video of the incident

Eventually both of the robbers took refuge inside their car, but with the owner still raining blows on the windshield with his iron, they seemingly started to panic, and couldn’t get the car started quickly. Their delay in making an escape proved costly, because it gave enough time for a second person to join the shop owner’s counterattack: his wife, who rushed the car while spraying a can of insecticide through the open driver’s-side window at the robbers inside.

▼ The owner’s wife joins the fight at the point of the video cued up here.

The robbers responded to the unexpected gas attack by raising the window. Unfortunately for them, by this time the owner had done enough damage to their windshield that cracks going all the way through the glass had formed. “Let me have the can,” the owner said to his wife, and after she passed it to him he began to spray the insecticide through the openings he’d made. As the car continued to fill with gas, the robbers realized they weren’t going to be able to breathe, so they opened up the doors and fled on foot into the night, leaving their vehicle and their sack of would-be stolen goods behind.

▼ Ginpoudou

Online reactions to the couple’s counterattack have been praising their quick-thinking, innovative tactics, and ferocity.

“You do NOT want to make that couple angry.”
“That’s one tough woman.”
“Some seriously speedy situational analysis by the wife.”
“It must have been a special kind of hell inside that car when it started filling with gas.”
“No need to hold back with bad guys like those two.”
“Spray them cockroaches!”
“They should make this into an insecticide commercial.”
“That’s the most satisfying ending to a video I’ve seen in a long while.”
“Well done, owner and wife!”

The shop owner suffered no direct injuries from the thieves, but did step on broken glass during the incident, which doctors say will take about two weeks to heal. Police apprehended one of the robbers, a 69-year-old man who has admitted to the charges, nearby soon after, and are searching for his accomplice, who’s said to be in his 50s. For his sake, hopefully the police find him before the owner and his wife do.

Source: Nitele News via Otakomu, YouTube/日テレNEWS
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