Contingencies are an unpredictable part of even the best-laid plans. Where burglary is concerned, the unexpected always happens. Throughout Evans’s career as a thief, whenever he set out to burgle, he rarely took into account the nature of the people he was stealing from. He generally took people for granted and believed he was smarter than everyone else—including law enforcement, Horton especially. Innocent people were, to Evans, merely obstacles. He believed he would always escape the jobs he did unblemished because he had thought every aspect through in detail. As for the Square Lion in Watertown, because of the uncontrollable greed he harbored, Evans was about to break one of his golden rules of never entering a building while someone was inside.
Douglas Berry, for some reason, still had the lights on in the Square Lion as 9:00 turned to 10:00 P.M., and 11:00 crept up on midnight. He was either watching television or working late. Either way, as Evans and Damien waited patiently for the signal—lights out—to go in, they wondered whether the opportunity would ever arise.
“What the fuck is this guy doing?” Evans wondered out loud at one point.
Then, at about midnight, Berry emerged from the shop and walked up the street to Mr. Sub, a local grinder shop. Inside, he chitchatted with the girl behind the counter about collecting baseball cards. After about twenty minutes, the girl finished making Berry’s favorite grinder, a turkey sub, handed him an orange soda, and, after Berry paid, before he left, he said, “Stop by the shop tomorrow about ten A.M.”
“You’ll be there?”
“Yes, I’m sleeping there tonight.”
As Berry left, four white males, who had been hanging around inside the sub shop while he had been talking to the clerk, followed him out. The clerk recalled later that there were two more white males waiting outside. And they “might have overheard her conversation” with Berry about the baseball cards.
Seeing that Berry wasn’t going to be going to sleep any time soon, Evans and Damien decided to go out and get something to eat.
By 12:30 A.M., September 8, Berry finished his grinder and nestled himself up in his loft to watch television and fall asleep.
At about 4:30 A.M., nearly daylight, Evans recalled later, he made a decision that Berry had been sleeping long enough for them to get in without being heard. But there was a slight change of plans, he mentioned to Cuomo. Evans said he would now go in first, but he wanted Cuomo right behind him. As soon as Evans got inside, as Damien Cuomo crawled through the window, Evans explained, he was going to sneak up behind Berry while he slept, hold his .22-caliber pistol to Berry’s head and watch him until Damien zipped around the shop and collected what they wanted.
If Berry so much as twitched, Evans promised, he was going to shoot him in the back of the head.
“Sounds good, Gar,” Damien said.
With that, Evans remembered later, he “grabbed the fire escape and got a good hold…then reached down and pulled Damien up.” From there, they walked across the piping the electrical wire was housed in and made it to the window in under a minute.
Looking at the window, Evans whispered, “It’s fucking open! I told you.”
Not a few minutes after they had emerged from Damien’s Fifth Avenue, Evans and Damien were standing inside the Square Lion Coin and Jewelry, and no one—including Douglas Berry—had seen or heard a thing.
Once inside, Evans pointed to where he wanted Cuomo to begin. Then he sneaked up behind Berry, who had shuffled a bit as he approached but didn’t wake up, and knelt quietly behind him, the barrel of his .22 pointed directly at his head.
Don’t you fucking move a muscle, old man.