Thanks to a Store Manager, Armed Robber Chooses Jesus Over Cash

(July 31) -- A Florida cell phone store manager confronted by a robber with a gun convinced the man not to steal from her by preaching about Jesus, according to dramatic footage captured by the store's security cameras.

Nayara Goncalves, 20, calmly told the armed robber, who was dressed in black with a hood and black baseball cap obscuring his face, "You can do whatever you want, but I'm just going to talk to you about Jesus, my God, before you leave."

"I don't know what you're going through, but all of us are going through a hard time right now," Goncalves told him during a robbery attempt at her store in Pompano Beach on July 23. Footage was captured on security cameras, and the Broward County sheriff's office released it to several news outlets. Its contents couldn't be independently verified.

"Talk about making it harder," the man replied sardonically. When Goncalves told him she was a Christian, the robber responded: "So am I, and I absolutely hate doing this."

"I've never done this before... but I'm going to be evicted if I don't come up with $300. I'm so sorry to do this to you," he said. Their exchange went on for about five minutes, before the man decided to leave empty-handed, confessing that his weapon was only a BB gun. "God bless you," he called out as he exited the store.

Authorities have since identified the man as 37-year-old Israel Camacho of Coral Springs, whose conscience, they say, did not keep him in check for very long. A few minutes after he left the cell phone store empty-handed, telling Goncalves he would go to church instead of turning to crime, Camacho allegedly walked into a Payless shoe store a few miles away and robbed it at gunpoint.

Employees identified him on another video recorded at the shoe store, and Camacho was arrested two days later, according to The Miami Herald. He was already behind bars when the cell phone store's CCTV footage was released to the media this week.

Even though he told Goncalves he'd "never done this before," detectives say Camacho is a "serial robber" who's been in and out of Florida jails since 1998, and served 18 months in prison six years ago for forgery and grand theft, the Herald reported.

Afterward, Goncalves told the BBC that Camacho "didn't look that bad."

"He didn't look like a criminal. It made me a bit more confident about what I wanted to tell him," she said. "I just felt like hugging him and saying, 'Please don't do this.'"

Veda Coleman-Wright, spokeswoman for the Broward County sheriff's office, told the BBC she's never seen anything like it in her 14 years on the job. Goncalves "was able to remain calm and keep him calm," she said.

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