One day before a Westwego convenience store's surveillance camera captured him firing a .44-caliber revolver on Dec 19 2008 at a clerk he apparently had never met, Danny Ray Tollett had shot at a clerk he had argued with at a store in Terrytown, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said.
Tollett, 46, spent Saturday in the Jefferson Parish jail, held in lieu of $450,000 bond on charges including attempted second-degree murder and aggravated assault with a firearm.
The charges stemmed from the separate incidents in which investigators said he opened fire at 2 store clerks of Arabic descent.
A little after 2 p.m., Tollett shoved a revolver's barrel past a glass sliding partition and pulled the trigger at a clerk behind the counter of a store at 1200 West Bank Expressway, Westwego Police Department Chief Dwayne Munch said.
Shortly after Tollett's arrest later on, Munch said Jefferson Parish authorities would try to determine whether Tollett also was the gunman in a similar shooting at a Magnolia Discount Store in the 100 block of Terry Parkway on Thursday about 5 p.m.
Detectives determined that Tollett was indeed that gunman, said Col. John Fortunato, a Sheriff's Office spokesman.
The charges from that shooting were tacked on while Tollett was behind bars for the other shooting.
An apparently drunken man walked into the Terrytown store about 2 p.m. rattling off curse words, said a man who declined to give his name but identified himself as the gunman's target. The clerk said he told the man to leave.
The man did so but returned with a gun about 5 p.m., said Fortunato, whose agency has jurisdiction over Terrytown.
The man then shot at the clerk who had ordered him from the store earlier, he said. No one was hurt.
The next day about 2 p.m., a man wearing a dark-blue shirt bearing the words "sick of it all" walked into a Westwego convenience store with a high-powered revolver in his waistband and waited in line, Munch said.
Surveillance footage showed that when the man got to the counter, he pulled the gun from his waistband, cocked it, slipped it through a glass partition separating clerks from customers and pointed it at the clerk standing there.
