- April 24, 2024
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Brandon Jovan Hubbert (Photo courtesy of the Flagler County Sheriff's Office)
A 27-year-old Bunnell man turned himself in at the Flagler County jail Sept. 22 on charges that he’d robbed the Staples in Palm Coast at gunpoint more than a year ago.
Deputies had been looking into Bunnell resident Brandon Hubbert’s possible connection with the crime ever since a Staples employee mentioned him to a deputy last October, saying that Hubbert was a former Staples employee from several years prior and that he fit the description of the robber.
The robbery itself happened after the Staples on Palm Coast Parkway locked its doors at around 9 p.m. Sept. 11, 2015.
The robber had entered the store earlier, at about 7:54 p.m. Surveillance video from the nearby Beall’s outlet showed the robber, wearing a gray sweatshirt with the Florida State University logo, walk inside while holding a cell phone in his hand.
The robber then hid in a storage bay in the back of the building. After the store locked up, the robber left the storage bay, knocking some boxes over and leaving a shoe print on one as he left, and walked up to the store’s cash room.
His hoodie pulled tight around his face, the robber approached store employee David Miller in the cash room from behind and pointed a small black handgun at him.
He called Miller by his first name, telling him he didn’t want to hurt him and ordering him to disconnect the office phone and place the cash in the robber’s book bag.
Miller placed about $1,500 in the robber’s bag.
"The suspect kept rushing him to hurry up and thrusted the gun at him," according to a Sheriff’s Office case report.
The robber then told the employee to give him his cell phone and lie on the floor with his hands on his head and count to 100.
The robber left the room and walked to the back of the store, where he kicked the rear door open, damaging it, as he left.
After a store employee mentioned Hubbert’s name to a deputy, the deputy looked Hubbert up on Facebook, where the deputy found pictures of Hubbert wearing a gray sweatshirt with a Florida State University logo, like the one visible in the surveillance video.
The deputy then found Hubbert’s phone number from a pawn shop transaction and requested cell phone records that showed which towers Hubbert’s phone pinged when the phone sent or received messages.
The cell phone records, which the deputy received at the end of April 2016, put Hubbert’s phone near the site of the robbery during the time it was committed.
On May 10, the deputy interviewed Hubbert at the Sheriff’s Office. Hubbert confirmed that he’d worked at Staples in the past, including in the rear storage bay.
“I observed that the defendant has the same build, body style, height and walk as the person observed on Beall’s surveillance footage,” the deputy wrote in an arrest report.
Hubbert couldn’t explain why cell phone records placed him near the Staples for more than an hour that night, though he said he was often in Palm Coast around the time of the robbery. His shoes — Vans — had the same waffle pattern tread and the same size as the print found on a box in the Staples storage room.
“During the interview, the defendant showed signs of being nervous and had two outbreaks of burping,” the deputy wrote in the report. The deputy believed Hubbert was “showing signs of deception.”
Detectives visited Hubbert’s mother’s house on Elm Street in Bunnell in June, looking for Hubbert, who lived there. The mother yelled at Hubbert on the phone, confronting him about being involved in the case, and Hubbert “does not deny being involved and stated that his child” — a young girl, shown in numerous photos on his Facebook page — “will be taken care of,” according to the arrest report.
An arrest warrant was issued for Hubbert Sept. 21 on charges of robbery with a firearm, tampering with a witness by preventing communication with law enforcement, burglary while armed with a firearm and aggravated assault.
Hubbert turned himself in at the jail at about 12:30 a.m. Sept. 22. He remained in jail as of the afternoon of Sept. 23 on $110,000 bond.
