Animal Medical Center jacked for the second time

There have been robberies at unusual places and yesterday afternoon’s robbery at the Animal Medical Center at the corner of Castle and Lancaster Street proved to be no less odd. Michael Deshield, Veterinarian and owner of the clinic told us about the ordeal he, his staff and customers experienced at the hands of robbers masked with bandanas.

Michael Deshield, Owner Animal Medical Center
“We had a full clinic. Two of our vets were here. They were in the room and two individuals came on a bike. They had a puppy with them, which they brought in; a little scrawny little thing. As we tend to do, we take anybody in and look at it. So they brought the dog in a promptly put it on the desk by the receptionist. One of the individuals closed the door and the other guy produced a gun and told everybody in the reception area to lie down and not to look up. Then they went behind the desk and went into the register where we took the cash, took that and then proceeded to take our clients’ money and cell phones and things like that then immediately ran out, run back in and grabbed the little dog and took off.”

“You can only do so much and you could lock up yourself, or move out and go away but that’s not the answer. We have to find some way that we could stem this and try to prevent this from happening. We have always prized ourselves to be in a community, in an area where a lot of people think is a rough area but in reality we’ve been in operation over ten years and it’s only just recently we’ve been having these two burglaries and it’s people who are not from the area and it’s very unfortunate. So it makes us think about how we’re doing business and everything here and it’s really sad now that we cannot offer services that we normally do; just have an open door police and everybody can come in.”

This is the second robbery of the clinic and Deshield says they may soon have to work by appointments only.