Clerk Uses Folding Chair on Wild, Masked Robber Waving a Baseball Bat

**kellyhound** · #1 ● 11-30-2008, 02:52 PM

November 15, 2008
When you're a convenience store owner working long hours in a rough part of town to feed your kids, a thug carrying a baseball bat might as well be armed with a "toothpick" for all the good it's going to do him.

A Windsor man learned that lesson the hard way when he burst into an Albert Road convenience store, wildly swinging an aluminum Easton bat and demanding cash and cigarettes.

Salim Baho, the store's owner for 13 years, was unruffled when a masked man smashed the bat into a box of beef jerky, his cash register and his lottery machine, shattering glass and causing an estimated $3,000 in damage.

Baho calmly picked up a metal folding chair from behind the counter and fended off the enraged robber like a professional lion tamer.

"A baseball bat, to me, is a toothpick. They're not going to scare me with that," said Baho, 37, a father of three who emigrated from Iraq to Canada in 1993.

"They could come at me with a helicopter and I wouldn't give up. As long as I'm working here to feed my kids, I'll never give up."

A bricklayer who was sipping coffee and shooting the breeze with Baho about 4:30 p.m. Friday played a pivotal, if painful, role in helping Baho subdue the would-be robber.

When the assailant turned from Baho to focus on the bricklayer, Baho grabbed a metal bar from behind the counter and threw it to the bricklayer, who snatched it smoothly out of the air like a cowboy catching a rifle in some old school western.

The assailant smashed the bat into the bricklayer's right shoulder, but the bricklayer didn't back down. He socked the suspect and wrestled him to the ground in the back of the small store, toppling shelves lined with foodstuffs.

Baho leaped over the counter to lend a hand and the duo pinned the assailant to the ground, holding him there until police arrived about five minutes later.

"He came to the wrong place and the wrong person," Baho said. "My money, I make it to feed my kids. It's not to feed crackheads and a--holes."

A 51-year-old man is in custody facing charges of robbery, assault with a weapon and having his face covered in the commission of a robbery. Police did not release his name.