Shortly before 9 p.m. Wednesday, two men stepped into a Stoneridge Apartments living room, their faces masked by bandannas, holding guns. The residents inside thought it was a prank.
Sixteen UF students were playing Bible Jeopardy. They were discussing the relationship between Jacob and Isaac when the strangers walked in. The room went quiet.
“We were waiting for the punchline from the prank,” said a student who lives in the apartment. “The punchline was almost a punch itself.”
The two men demanded — not loudly, but firmly — the students’ belongings. They took four laptops, three cellphones, wallets and purses. Their actions led to four arrests and a standoff that lasted about seven hours.
Marcus S. Brantley, 21, and Larance C. Scott, 21, were charged with home invasion robbery and false imprisonment. Martin L. Cadet, 23, who allegedly drove the getaway car, received the same charges.
Cherrion L. Williams, 18, was also in the car, and was arrested on an outstanding warrant from Orange County. Williams and Cadet have a 1-year-old daughter together, according to Gainesville Police. The Florida Department of Child Services took the baby.
The man who lives in the apartment, a first-year medical school student who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said the robbery didn’t last long — two minutes at the most.
Brantley and Scott rummaged through their hostages’ pockets and sorted out the goods. They inspected cellphones and kept the expensive ones.
Minutes later, one student grabbed his phone and dialed 911.
Shortly after 9 p.m., a white Mustang sped into the parking lot of the Gateway at Glades apartment complex. Brantley hopped out, still wearing his bandanna, and ran upstairs carrying a laptop and some bags, according to police. The others followed.
Officers in the area figured out the suspects ran into a third-floor apartment.
GPD knocked on the door. Lights were turned off, and blinds shifted. Nobody answered.
Officers established a perimeter around the building. Nobody in, nobody out.
Shortly after midnight Thursday, one of the men in the Stoneridge apartment still did not know he had been robbed. He slept through it.
The man, a third-year drawing student who also asked to remain anonymous, pulled all-nighters on Monday and Tuesday. He had to finish some assignments before Spring Break, and he was exhausted.
His brother woke him around 12:20 a.m. Some burglars took his laptop, he was told.
The man started drawing when he 6 years old, and he has wanted to be an artist for as long as he can remember. He is applying for art programs in New York and Chicago. He is also trying to land an internship with Pixar.
His portfolio is filled with ceramics and sculptures — enough to fill his whole apartment if he kept them, he said.
But he hasn’t. The studio on campus couldn’t hold all of them, so he takes pictures and disassembles them.
One arrangement, a waterfall, was five times as big as him. It required 70 pounds of paper, he said. But now it was gone. More than two years’ worth of work, all on his laptop.
“It’s a collection of so many works, so many hours, so many bottles of paint,” he said. “Then, it was just thrown away.”
With the suspected robbers still inside, GPD detective Martin Honeycutt obtained a search warrant. Officers back at the apartment continued to negotiate on loudspeakers, but by 2:30 a.m., they still had not convinced anyone to come outside.
Asked how officers stayed alert, Honeycutt said, “Coffee and keeping ourselves busy. You keep going. You keep going.”
Eventually, officers realized Brantley’s girlfriend lived nearby, according to police. She contacted Brantley, and around 3 a.m. he came outside. For the next 30 minutes or so, Honeycutt estimated, the others in the apartment emptied out, one by one.
Honeycutt’s shift began at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, and he was still at the office at 11 a.m. Thursday. He drank four cups of coffee.
The men in the Stoneridge apartment pushed through the night. One kept busy making phone calls. The other tossed and turned, convincing himself that everything was going to work out, that he was simply going to have to start a new portfolio.
Eventually, they both fell asleep. Neither remembers when. Then, at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, they awoke to a call.
Officers found everything, including the laptop with the portfolio.
Contact Tyler Jett at tjett@alligator.org.
Marcus S. Brantley, 21, who was arrested and charged with home invasion robbery, walks to a police car Thursday morning.
