Coronavirus masks a boon for crooks who hide their faces

What sort of FBI tells it, William Rosario Lopez placed on a surgical mask and walked in to the Connecticut convenience store seeking to the world such as a typical pandemic-era shopper as he picked up plastic wrap, fruit snacks and a few other items. Then, when the only other customer left, he visited the counter, pulled out a tiny pistol, pointed it at the clerk and demanded that he open the cash register.

The scene, the FBI contends in a court document, was repeated by Lopez in four other gas station stores over eight days before his April 9 arrest. It underscores a troubling new reality for law enforcement: Masks which have made criminals stand apart a long time before bandanna-wearing robbers knocked over stagecoaches in the Old West and ski-masked bandits organized banks now permit them to blend in like concerned accountants, nurses and store clerks trying in order to avoid a deadly virus.

“Criminals, they're smart which is a perfect chance of them to conceal themselves and blend right in,” said Richard Bell, police chief in the tiny Pennsylvania community of Frackville. He said he knows of seven recent armed robberies in the region where every suspect wore a mask.

Across the United States, masks have become a growing number of prevalent, first as a voluntary precaution and then as a requirement imposed by governmental agencies and businesses. And persons with masks - along with latex gloves - have found their way into a growing number of crime reports.

How many criminals are taking good thing about the pandemic to commit crimes is impossible to estimate, but law enforcement officials have no doubt the numbers are climbing. Reports are beginning to pop up over the USA and in other areas of the world of crimes pulled off in no small part because so many of us are actually wearing masks.

In March, two men walked into Aqueduct Racetrack in NY wearing the same sort of surgical masks as many racing fans there and, at gunpoint, robbed three employees of a quarter-million dollars they were moving from gaming machines to a safe. Other robberies involving suspects wearing surgical masks have occurred in North Carolina, and Washington, D.C, and elsewhere in recent weeks.

The problem isn't limited to robberies. In the troubled Cook County Jail in Chicago, the virus has resulted in at least nine deaths and sickened hundreds of inmates and correctional officers. Staffers must wear masks and inmates are issued a fresh one each day - an insurance plan that helped one inmate escape on, may 2.

Jahquez Scott, jailed on a gun charge and for violating his bond in a drug case, has tattoos of a tiny heart on one cheek and what appears like a blood-dripping scar on the other. But when he wore a mask, he posed as Quintin Henderson - who does not have tattoos on his face and was scheduled to be released, authorities said.

Scott managed to get out, though he was captured a week later.

In addition to rare jailbreaks, the prevalence of masks in society has created other problems for police. Before life in a pandemic, masked marauders had to free their faces immediately after leaving a bank or store to avoid suspicion once in everyone. But it was included with the risk to be photographed and identified through omnipresent surveillance cameras and cellphones.

These days, they are able to keep carefully the masks on and merge easily with or without having to be “captured” in images.

“The video is a lot less useful if we cannot visit a face,” said Carlos Marquez, a detective division commander in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, within an email.

It's leaving police with out a crucial crime-solving tool.

“Guys are like, ‘OK, I have to wear a mask, the authorities will not stop me on the path to a crime and back from a crime wearing a mask,’" said Brendan Deenihan, chief of detectives for Chicago Police Department. “Now if you are going to commit a crime you can leave your house with a mask on and drive for one hour.”

With everyone basically incognito, would-be witnesses may not notice someone acting differently, and that could make it harder to have a good description or identification of the suspect, said Eric Nuñez, chief of the Los Alamitos Police Department in Southern California and president of the California Police Chiefs Association.

It's less likely given that other shoppers would “stare at them, just making mental notes of what they appear to be,” Nuñez said. “If indeed they look like every person else walking in, they may not do that at all.”

It's a real problem for clerks and tellers, such as for example Tiffany Becker, who manages a Valero convenience store in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where a number of stores in the region have already been robbed by mask-wearing gunmen recently.

“Before I would have called the authorities because having a mask wasn’t normal. Now it’s normal," Becker said. “It’s scary because you can’t tell who's safe and who’s not.”

Even though investigators identify suspects, the protective gear makes putting cases together all that much more difficult. The same latex gloves more persons are wearing to safeguard themselves from picking right up the virus will mean fewer fingerprints at crime scenes.

“In the past if you did a search warrant and you found surgical masks, that would be highly indicative of something (suspicious),” said FBI Special Agent Lisa MacNamara, who investigated the string of robberies in Connecticut that resulted in the arrest of Rosario Lopez. “Now every person has masks or latex gloves.”

But the reverse can even be true.

MacNamara and her team’s investigation was doable when his alleged accomplice went in to the stores “acting as a lookout or ‘casing’ robbery locations.”

The accomplice hadn’t worn a mask.