A 35-year-old Richmond man has pleaded guilty to robbing an East Bay pharmacy at gunpoint and illegally possessing a fully automatic handgun, admitting in federal court that he pointed what turned out to be a paintball gun at a CVS employee before fleeing onto a BART train with a cash drawer worth $247.22.
Mario Robinson admitted in his federal plea agreement that during the July 9, 2024 robbery, he wore a black ski mask and pointed an AR-style paintball gun at an employee behind the counter before stealing the cash drawer and fleeing, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. The office announced the plea on Thursday. As The Mercury News reported, authorities tracked Robinson’s movements using a GPS device hidden inside the cash drawer itself, allowing police to follow him even after he boarded the train.
That tracking technology relies on covert units that automatically activate during a robbery and feed real-time location data to dispatchers, according to product documentation from security manufacturer 3SI Security Systems. Officers ultimately arrested Robinson and recovered a duffle bag containing his robbery clothes, the stolen cash drawer, and the AR-style paintball gun, per the same Mercury News account.
A Second, More Dangerous Encounter in the Tenderloin
Robinson’s guilty plea also covers a February 25 shooting in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where he fired a Glock 22 .40-caliber handgun fitted with an illegal conversion device, commonly known as a switch, at a group of people outside a convenience store. In his plea agreement, Robinson admitted to manually racking the slide between single shots when the weapon jammed before successfully firing an automatic multi-round burst, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California…