A Derby man received a three-year prison sentence Oct. 3 for his role in the robbery of a Shelton Avenue convenience store late last year.
Nicholos Cowell, 20, pleaded guilty before Judge Frank Iannotti to first-degree robbery and conspiracy to commit first-degree robbery.
A plea deal in the case called for an eight-year prison sentence to be suspended after Cowell serves three years, followed by five years of probation.
Cowell has been behind bars since his arrest in the case in February.
Another man charged in the robbery, Jonathan Russell, received a five-year prison sentence in August. Russell also pleaded guilty to burglarizing several vehicles in Shelton.
Arrest warrants charging the two men said that on the night of Dec. 18, Russell and Cowell dressed in black hoodies, black ski masks and black gloves and told a friend they were going to “do something to get money.”
They returned 45 minutes later, with about $1,300 in cash, according to warrants used to charge the two men.
Police claim that at about 11 p.m., the two went into the Shelton Buck Stop on Shelton Avenue, and robbed the shop at knife-point.
The thieves were unidentifiable in surveillance footage from the scene, according to the warrants. But the Buck Stop store clerk was able to see through the eye holes in their masks that they were white, and one had blue eyes.
Also, Shelton police had received calls from several residents in Huntington stating that two men dressed all in black were seen looking into cars in their neighborhoods on the night of Dec. 18. One resident wrote down a license plate number.
The license plate number belonged to a car owned by Cowell’s girlfriend. Police talked to her shortly after the robbery, asking where her car was the weekend of Dec. 18. The girlfriend said it was getting repaired.
A friend later told police that the friend had heard the two men talking about robbing the Buck Stop.
Police then received search warrants for the homes of Russell and Cowell.
At Cowell’s home, police found a red-handled Swiss Army knife. The knife used in the robbery was described by the clerk as a red-handled 4‑inch knife. Details in the court file don’t indicate if the Swiss Army knife is the same knife from the robbery.
In Russell’s Shelton home, they found five black hooded sweatshirts, as well as several items identified as having been stolen from parked, unlocked cars in town.
