A 26-year-old store clerk was shot in the hand on Sunday during an attempted robbery at a Williamsburg smoke shop.
Cops said two perps dressed in all black walked into the Day & Night smoke shop at 186 Scholes St. at 6:15 p.m. and ordered the clerk to hand over some products.
The victim refused, and the thieves shot him in the hand and fled the scene. Paramedics brought the clerk to Elmhurst Hospital in stable condition.
A day after the incident, the shop was still roped off with crime tape and law enforcement sources believed a warrant was being secured in order to search the shop — though it was not immediately clear what they would be looking for.
The store appeared to stock drug paraphernalia including bongs and grinders for marijuana, as well as snacks and marijuana-infused goods. Retail sale of marijuana is legal in New York, but there are still no legal, properly-licensed marijuana stores in Brooklyn. That hasn’t stopped the proliferation of “gray-market” shops, which have proven difficult for legislators to regulate.
Those shops can be prime targets for thieves – in part because they often have large amounts of cash in the register. Earlier this year, an armed robber stole $1,500 worth of goods and cash from a Prospect Heights smoke shop.
Robberies on the whole have risen slightly in the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg this year — 138 robberies had been reported in the precinct as of Sept. 24, according to the most recently-available police data, up from 133 in the same time period last year.
