GREENSBORO — They cooked up the scheme in the locker room of the
gentleman’s club where they worked: Meet a customer after hours and rob
him of the $20,000 he had with him.
Other strippers had talked about doing the same thing. But three
local women decided in November they would carry out the scenario, all
to help one of the group, whose family was about to lose its home and
car.
But their hastily concocted plan, described in court testimony Thursday, didn’t work out the way they had planned.
The getaway? They dropped the bag they had stolen and left one of the strippers behind.
They had to go back to
pick up their friend — and to search for the money, because the duffel
bag they stole didn’t have any money in it.
The three strippers
testified in Guilford County Superior Court about their role, with the
help of two Greensboro men, in the botched robbery.
The women — Jessica Gibbs
Salinas, 23, of Reidsville; Heaven Leigh Shoffner, 20, of Mocksville;
and Sommer Nicole Painter, 21, of Greensboro — entered into plea
agreements with prosecutors early this week to avoid harsher sentences,
prosecutors said. They had faced felony assault and robbery charges.
The women pleaded guilty
to conspiracy to commit armed robbery and testified Thursday in the
trial of Ali Mahamed Sheikh, 21, and Abdulkadir Sharif Ali, 22, who are
charged with armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting
serious injury.
Painter told the court
she drank tequila and used marijuana and cocaine the night of Nov. 19,
when the women came up with their plan. Salinas told her a man with her
at Christie’s Cabaret on Wendover Drive had $20,000, Painter testified.
The women talked in the club’s locker room and decided to call somebody
and get involved in a robbery, Painter said.
“Other girls had talked about doing it before,” Painter testified.
She told the court she
never was going to get any money out of the robbery because all of it
was going to be used to help Salinas’ family, who was about to lose its
home and car.
Salinas agreed to meet
with the victim in his room at a Marriott hotel after she got off work,
about 3 a.m. on Nov. 20, police testified. She called the victim to let
him know she was on the way.
She also exchanged text
messages with Sheikh, who instructed her to look for security cameras
and make sure the victim had the money, police testified.
But Shoffner testified
that she dropped Salinas off at the wrong hotel, then when they realized
it was the wrong place, drove her to the correct one.
Salinas met with the
victim and went to his room, police testified, and she and Sheikh
exchanged text messages, with Sheikh saying he would arrive in five
minutes. Sheikh, Painter and another man, believed to be Ali, went in a
back door of the hotel, the women told the court, and Salinas let them
into the room.
The man fought back, and
someone hit him in the head with a handgun, Painter testified. The
victim received a severe cut on his head, which required nine staples to
close, according to arrest warrants.
The four grabbed the
victim’s duffel bag and ran from the hotel. Sheikh was blood-spattered
when he ran out of the hotel, Painter testified.
As they ran, one of the
men fell in the parking lot and scattered the bag’s contents on the
ground. They gathered the items and got into two cars to drive away.
When the group got to
Painter’s Greensboro apartment, they realized they didn’t have the money
or Salinas, and Painter sent Shoffner back to look for both, according
to testimony.
Police were milling about
at the hotel, and she couldn’t get in to the parking lot to search,
Shoffner testified. Salinas had been hiding in nearby woods but ran and
got into Shoffner’s car.
The two women went back to the apartment empty-handed, she told the court.
Police arrested Salinas,
Sheikh and Ali in December but didn’t say how they connected them to the
robbery. It wasn’t clear from available records late Thursday when
Painter and Shoffner were arrested.
