EAST HARTFORD — An employee at a Main Street pawn shop fatally shot one
of two masked men during a botched robbery Tuesday evening.

Bill Kane fired the shots after the robber, armed with a pipe,
approached him and would not heed his warnings that he had a gun, said
Tom Tinney, the owner of Tom’s pawn shop at 1100 Main St. A second
robber, who attacked Kane’s co-worker, fled when the shots were fired,
police and Tinney said.

The second robber was chased by an officer and his police dog, who lost
him on nearby Rector Street. He was still being sought late Tuesday
night.

No charges are expected to be filed against Kane, a police spokesman
said. The shooting was the third violent death on Main Street within the
past two months.

About 5:30 p.m., Kane was working in the rear section of the shop and
his co-worker, Ralph Lane, was handling wares at a jewelry repair
workbench in the front of the store. It was a time of day when rush hour
traffic typically streams along Main Street.

Without warning, two men armed with metal pipes entered the store, said
Tinney, 70, who had been at a doctor’s appointment at the time and
learned of the episode later from the two employees.

The “two perps came in swinging pipes, yelling,
`Open the safe!?” Tinney said, referring to the masked men. “They were
hitting the cases and hitting everything with their pipes.”

When one of the robbers hit him, Lane managed to trigger a burglar
alarm, summoning the police. At the same time, another robber moved
toward the back of the store to confront Kane, Tinney said.

Kane, an Army veteran, drew a .380 mm pistol, for which he has a permit.
He warned the robber that he was armed.

“Mr. Kane told him that he had a gun, but [the robber] kept coming like
he didn’t believe it or was crazed up on dope,” Tinney said.

Kane “emptied seven shots,” Tinney said, and “two of them hit one of the
perps.” Startled at the gunfire, Lane’s attacker fled. Tinney said it
wasn’t clear whether the man who fled was wounded.

That man ran north on Main Street and east on Rector Street, with
Officer John Zavalick and his police dog, Raven, in pursuit. They lost
the man on Rector Street, police spokesman Hugo Benettieri said.

The robber is described as about 5 feet 9 inches tall, with a slim
build. He was wearing a gray sweat shirt, a gray hood and dark-colored
jeans, Benettieri said.

As police chased the second man, paramedics rushed the wounded man from
the store and brought him to Hartford Hospital, where he was pronounced
dead.

“I saw him come out and they were pumping him and stuff,” said a
12-year-old who walked past the chaotic scene.

Lane refused to seek medical treatment for his injuries Tuesday night.

“He’s got a pretty big knot on his arm,” and also suffered a blow to his
back, Tinney said.
Through Tinney, Kane declined comment.

“Mr. Kane is just terrible torn up,” Tinney said.
“That’s why he doesn’t want to talk about it.” Benettieri said Kane’s
actions appear to have been in self-defense.

Detectives remained at the store into the night, and officers canvassed
the downtown neighborhood. Customers of a neighboring Chinese restaurant
- some with young children – anxiously walked past the crime scene tape
to get their meals.

Dinner in hand, Trina Roller guided her 4-year-old, Austen Pena, away
from the scene, where a bullet had punched a hole in the store’s plate
glass and a pipe lay on the sidewalk.

“It’s scary,” she said. “I would have freaked if we were in there when
it happened,” she said of the restaurant.

Tuesday’s shooting was the third violent death downtown in the past two
months.

On Nov. 9, the body of 54-year-old Diane Johnson was found in a rooming
house above the Sports Page Caf? at 860 Main St. An autopsy showed she
died of cranial cerebral trauma, the result of a homicide. No arrest has
been made.

On Oct. 1, the body of Michael Alfred Owen was discovered in a room at
the Town Hall Inn, which is at 1112 Main St., just a few doors away from
Tom’s. An autopsy revealed Owen had been killed by blunt force trauma to
the head.

Two days later, police arrested Mark Johnson, 46, who lived at the same
rooming house, and charged him with murder and third-degree larceny.

Tinney opened the nearby pawn shop about five years ago. Because his
business deals in antique coins, stamps and other valuables, and because
he is a jeweler by trade, he said, he is used to taking precautions such
as having armed workers and a burglar alarm system. “In this type of
business almost everybody has a gun on the premises,” he said.

Tuesday was not Tinney’s first encounter with crime at the store. “We’ve
had snatch-and-runs before. We’ve had a couple of big expensive things
taken away,” he said.

Tinney said he and his workers would not let Tuesday’s events stop them
from carrying on their business. “If you were to have a bad automobile
accident tonight, God forbid, and somebody was killed whether it was
your fault or not,” what would be the outcome, he asked. His answer was,
“You don’t stop driving.”

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