A status conference is scheduled for Jan. 5 for an East Troy man who pleaded not guilty Oct. 31 to holding up a Subway restaurant in Whitewater at knifepoint.
Gregory La Mar Brackinridge, 52, was charged Oct. 10 in Walworth County Circuit Court with armed robbery.
According to the criminal complaint, two employees of Subway East Side on Milwaukee Street in Whitewater reported that on March 10, a young man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, a black leather jacket and a skull mask entered the store, pushed one of the women down in a booth with a knife in his hand and told her to “stop freaking out.”
He then went to the register holding the knife, reached over the counter and asked for money from the other woman, according to the complaint. The woman went to the back room, got a black box that contained money and handed it to the man, and he left, according to the complaint.
On Aug. 8, Whitewater police reviewed a Wisconsin Crime Alert regarding a person who was arrested in Madison for a home invasion. The suspect had a Halloween mask that was similar to the skull mask used in the Subway robbery, according to the complaint. The mask was in a rental vehicle from Cupid Car Rental in Fort Atkinson where Brackinridge had routinely rented cars since December, according to the complaint.
A GPS system in the car Brackinridge had rented showed the vehicle was at 209 S. Taft St., which is across the street from Subway, from 7:20 to 7:33 p.m. March 10. The robbery was called in at 7:35 p.m. March 10. Police made contact with Brackinridge’s wife, who allowed police to search their home, and police found a black leather jacket in Brackinridge’s closet that matched the one the robber was wearing in the surveillance video from the robbery, according to the complaint.
