ALBANY — There was just one child in the federal courtroom Tuesday for the sentencing of Aristides Duartez III for his part in the 2012 robbery of a Guilderland jewelry store, and that was the convicted man’s daughter, barely old enough to walk. But the voices of several other children echoed through the courtroom as their mothers — the owner of Frank Adams Jewelers and two of the employees who were threatened with a gun by Duartez — spoke of the lasting impact that the heist has had on their lives and on their families.

The robbery on Thursday, March 15 four years ago involved three men — two of them described by Guilderland Police at the time as black, and one as white — at least two of them wearing baseball caps. A baseball cap was later found on the ground in a nearby backyard, and DNA on it led police to Duartez.

At about 8 p.m., according to a description from the U.S. Department of Justice, Duartez, 37, of Brooklyn, and one of the other men entered the Stuyvesant Plaza store and asked two saleswomen about some of the jewelry on display. A third man then entered the store, went to the Rolex watch display, smashed the glass display case with a hammer, and then stole 20 watches worth approximately $99,000. A fourth robber waited outside in a getaway car.

As the watches were stolen, Duartez pulled out a handgun, jammed it into the back and ribs of one of the saleswomen, and then shoved her toward a back room. At the same time, another robber shoved the 77-year-old saleswoman to the same back room, pulled her to the floor by her hair and shot pepper spray into her face as she cried and complied with their directions. Duartez and another robber then tied the wrists of the saleswomen with zip-ties and left.

The three other robbers have never been apprehended.

Duartez had pleaded guilty to two counts, one of Hobbs Act robbery — meaning that the robbery involved exploiting the victims’ fear of physical injury or economic harm and also obstructed interstate commerce — and the other of brandishing a firearm in the commission of this crime.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Sharpe asked Judge Thomas J. McAvoy of the Northern District of New York Federal Court to sentence Duartez to a total of 262 to 327 months — from about 22 to 27 years — on the two counts, under the guidelines for a “career offender,” because Duartez has a criminal history consisting of two prior convictions on narcotics trafficking over the past 20 years.

First Assistant Federal Defender Paul Evangelista, representing Duartez, acknowledged the seriousness of the armed robbery but asked the judge not to increase Duartez’s sentence by a decade simply because he had sold, the lawyer said, “$110 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover” 20 years ago, when he was 17.

The judge said he believed that Duartez did qualify as a “career offender,” but that he would impose a “non-guideline sentence” of 15 years, because this would be “appropriate and adequate, but not greater than necessary under the statute.”

The victims

The three women who told the judge how the crime affected them asked to be allowed to stand together as they gave their statements, to make them feel more comfortable. The Enterprise is withholding their names.

The first woman to speak described herself as a “16-year employee” of the store. She said she had been in the bathroom throughout the robbery but was not hiding there, was not barricading herself as had been reported over the years. Instead, she said, she was there pumping breast milk for her newborn son.

She was in the bathroom, she said, with her “breasts exposed, my shirt up” as the events that she could hear but not see unfolded: she heard her 77-year-old coworker scream and then “felt her fall against the bathroom door and beg not to be hurt, and beg for her life.” She heard a “smashing bottle-like sound,” and “strange male voices with deep, threatening words.” She heard a part-time coworker, who was not supposed to be working that day but had filled in for someone who was sick, reassure the elderly employee that they were going to make it, and remind her to keep breathing.

There in the bathroom, she was “so filled with shame that I couldn’t do more to help these women, or to protect our store,” she said. She asked God to help her decide if she should open the door and “give myself up,” after one of the men rattled the door handle. She felt “so guilty” that she was “seemingly safe from harm,” while her coworkers — whom she called her “family” — faced a fate she could not see.  

She has never again breastfed or pumped milk since that night, she said. She said she could not bear the thought of closing herself into that small room again, and not knowing “what was happening to my team.” She could not bear the thought of being “exposed and vulnerable in that way.”

This employee noted that her two older children, not yet teenagers, worry that she is not safe at work and ask constantly what she will do if the robbers come back. Her daughter, she said, is terrified at home too. “She asks, as we are going to sleep every night, if they are going to get us. And I have to reassure her, every time we open and close the front door, that I have triple-locked it. And then she asks, ‘But Mama, what if they get us through the window?’” she said.

She mentioned the part-time employee who was there that night, and who she said was unable to bear standing in court with them and facing Duartez. It was this other employee whom Duartez had “led down the hall,” she said, “with a gun to her ribcage and restrained on her hands and knees.” She hoped that, once Duartez was sentenced, this employee — who she said has two daughters — “can finally stop shaking. I hope she can sleep an entire night through, without waking to night terrors.”

Store owner Kimberly Adams Russell said that she also has two young daughters “that I love to bring to work with me, or did love to bring to work with me,” and asked, rhetorically, “What if my small girls were there on that evening?” She said that she is the third generation in her family to run the nearly 100-year-old business, but that she is not sure now if she wants this life for her children, because of the element of fear that the robbery introduced.

Although she was not in the store at the time of the robbery, Adams Russell said she is afraid every time she hears the store’s door open; she looks into her rear-view mirror as she gets into her car after work; and she turns on her home alarm system even when she is at home.

“I have spent an incredible amount of resources, trying to make my family and my staff feel safe,” she said. “But the truth is, no matter how much money I spend, no matter how much I try, the likelihood is we will never feel safe again.”

The employee who was 77 at the time of the robbery is 82 now. During the robbery, she said in open court, “I did not only fear for my own life, but I feared for the life of my coworkers and friends.”

She no longer goes anywhere at night or feels comfortable “leaving my home or work to shop or socialize,” because, she said, she finds it hard to do so “without being incredibly fearful.” She has “terrible anxiety” and a new fear of strangers, and finds it “difficult to be open, warm, and friendly.”

The sentencing

McAvoy said that 15 years would reflect the seriousness of the crime, promote respect for the law, be a just punishment, deter others, protect the public, and avoid “unwarranted sentencing disparities among defendants.”

Addressing Duartez, the judge said that he was taking into consideration factors including “your total lack of youthful guidance, your [current] family ties and responsibilities,” and the fact that both prior drug trafficking charges, while serious, involved “relatively small quantities of drugs” and were considered nonviolent.

At the start of the proceeding, Duartez’s baby, who sat in the courtroom gallery with her mother and grandfather, began to cry and was ushered out in the arms of her grandfather.

Another episode from Duartez’s past, not mentioned in the courtroom, is an arrest in 2010, when he jumped from the second-story window of the Wernersville Community Corrections Center facility. Duartez jumped in order to evade his parole officer, who had arrived to arrest him, Trooper David Beohm, a public information officer with the Pennsylvania State Police, told The Enterprise. He was initially charged with escape, Beohm said, but the charges were later dropped, because he was not in custody, but just on parole, when he jumped.

In addition to the 15 years, McAvoy sentenced Duartez to three years’ probation on each count, to run concurrently, upon his release; to undergo substance-abuse treatment; and to refrain from directly or indirectly contacting any of the victims.

He will be ordered to pay restitution of an amount that will be decided later, in about two weeks’ time. McAvoy noted at sentencing that the pre-sentencing report he had received just that morning from the probation office recommended a revised amount of restitution—$119,274.20 instead of “roughly $99,000 and change,” the judge said—and suggested that the federal public defender take a couple of weeks to look into the reasons for the revised amount.

Asked if he was happy with the sentence, Paul Evangelista, Duartez’s attorney, said, “Not happy. It’s a horrible situation for everyone involved. For the lawyers too. You never get used to it.”

The Frank Adams saleswoman who was a nursing mother at the time of the robbery told the judge she’d heard that Duartez had a young daughter. Rhetorically, she wondered if that girl realized her father had terrorized the nursing mother’s daughter. Duartez is “like a monster” in her daughter’s eyes, she said, and is the reason why her daughter, too, “has to live in fear.”

Duartez’s fiancée told The Enterprise that his family is still standing behind Duartez and that she and her daughter will get through the coming years “somehow.”