A pair of off duty police officers – who were also married – dining together at a restaurant in Louisville, Ky. stopped an armed robbery on Saturday, and it was all caught on video.
Elizabethtown’s Detective Chase McKeown and his wife, Officer Nicole McKeown, were dining in a booth at a mostly empty Raising Cane’s restaurant when a masked suspect entered and demanded cash from an employee.
The restaurant surveillance video was released by the Louisville Metro Police Department on Tuesday.
The suspect, Justin Carter, didn’t notice the off-duty diners until they approached him with their guns drawn.
“That’s where that repetitiveness and that training kicks in,” Nicole McKeown told Wave3 News.
“We’re trained for those kinds of situations,” she said. “And when it comes to those people’s lives being in danger, I feel like any other officer here would have done the exact same thing.”
Carter dropped his weapon, and Chase and Nicole chased him out the door and down the street for a block until they could subdue him and hold him until Louisville Metro officers arrived to make the arrest.
“Our conversation leading up to it had nothing to do with whether or not we were going to do anything,” Chase McKeown said. “It was a matter of, this is happening, we’re trained to act, we acted. That’s all there was to it.”
Nicole and Chase married just six months earlier and enjoyed their first dining out as a married couple at the same restaurant.
“In marriage we’ve got each other,” Chase said. “We’re going to talk things out, we’re going to deal with whatever comes at us, we’ve had a lot we’ve dealt with in the last six months. It’s just another, like she said, another layer of trust that adds to and shows that I don’t have to worry about making sure she’s OK. She doesn’t have to worry about making sure I’m OK. We just take care of it.”
The firearm in Carter’s possession was later found to be stolen.
Carter is currently jailed at Metro Corrections on a $50,000 bond.
“It is my belief, if not for the heroic actions taken by these two officers, the perpetrator’s actions inside the business would have escalated,” Detective Dan Mason said, according to WCVB.
