Broomstick Weapon vs Wrench Elderly Gas Station Employee Beats Robber

by hearit

A 75-year-old gas station employee used a broomstick as a weapon--to fight off a robber wielding a wrench. Grabbing a broomstick typically used to yank down tires for station customers, the elderly gas station employee beat a man one-third of his age in both physical and mental smarts.

Station employee Dan McLeod at a station in Cave Junction, Oregon, says he thought it was a joke when a man wearing a sweatshirt and black mask visited the gas depot in early hours, as the station gas was being prepped for opening. As it turned out, the man wanted cash. "All of a sudden there's this guy with a mask on, telling me he wants all of our money," the elder employee says. "At first I thought it was somebody from around here [Cave Junction], playing a joke on me.

The situation became less of a joke, moments later, when the 75-year-old recounts, “Then he [the robber] told me he was going to kill me."

The (would-be) gas station robber is estimated between 20-25 years old, at most only one-third of McLeod’s seventy-five years in age.

The station employee surveyed the robber’s “weapon” of choice that the young man was holding: a small wrench about six inches long, which McLeod refers to as "a dinky little thing". The elder McLeod in turn chose his own weapon to battle the thief: a nearby broomstick. The 75-year-old station employee was able to use the broomstick as a weapon, hitting the thief several times and successfully backing the robber physically out of the gas station.

"Most of them guys [robbers] I think are scaredy-cats,” says the 75-year-old Oregon man, “or they wouldn't be trying to do something like that. It's stupid." "If he had a gun [as a weapon] it would have been a different story," says McLeod—saying he estimated odds to be in his favor.

"We've got these broom sticks [inside of the gas station], to get the tires off the top rack," fellow employee Wood says. "I guess he [McLeod] saw that the [robber’s weapon] was pretty small [as a wrench] and just let him have it," says the fellow 68-year-old. Wood says McLeod’s "an old timer, and he's pretty salty."

“Salty”? Like Jerry Brown referring to Meg Whitman kinda “salty”?

McLeod isn’t planning any days off—not that the gas station offered him any time off, despite the good deed and the employee’s forthcoming birthday. The 75 (soon to be 76-year-old) will need a new ‘weapon’ to battle employer ineptitude—and that weapon remains to be found.

In the meantime, learn more than you ever wanted to know about weapons--and tools as weapons, including the common broomstick--at the link for the Zombie Survival website. Or view Assassin's Creed 2 at the attached video clip for multiple uses of a broomstick as a weapon.