By Julie Bisbee
The Oklahoman
HUGO - Sheila Almond didn’t panic when she found a man in her liquor store wearing a ski mask, holding a gun and demanding money.
Almond’s 84-year-old mother, who was working the cash register at West Main Liquor on Thursday evening, backed away as the robber came around the counter for the cash register.
That’s about the time Almond entered the scene.
“My wife told him his ski mask was crooked - she can’t stand things like that - and to get on the other side of the counter and she’d give him the money,” said Bob Almond, owner of the liquor store who was at home at the time.
“I knew it was up to me to protect everybody,” said Sheila Almond, who was back at work Friday afternoon. “I can’t believe I talked to him the way I did. I was just playing for time so my mother could get out.”
Sheila Almond, 59, first shot the man in the shoulder with a pistol. When that didn’t slow him down, she laid a shotgun on the counter and blasted him in the abdomen.
“She blowed him out the door,” Bob Almond said.
Guy Wade Buck, 50, was flown to a Texarkana hospital and remained on a ventilator in critical condition Friday afternoon, according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
The gun he was carrying turned out to be a plastic air gun, said OSBI officials, who are assisting Hugo police in the investigation.
“I kept thinking that bullets were going to come,” Sheila Almond said. “I really expected him to shoot me, to shoot all of us.”
‘Bring Baby’
After the shooting, Almond said she called her attorney.
“I asked him about what I had done,” Almond said. “He said, ‘You took care of it.’ I shot him from the front. He had reached over and grabbed tens and they were scattered all over the parking lot. He did do a strong-arm robbery.”
Owning a liquor store, the Almonds have anticipated that someday they would be held up. Sheila Almond wasn’t counting on being the only one in the store who knew how to use a gun when that happened.
After ordering the robber to the other side of the counter, she told an employee to “Bring her ‘Baby,’ - that’s what we call the shotgun,” her husband said.
Sheila Almond, who is blind in her right eye, wanted the robber to think there was a child in the store - maybe he would leave, she said.
“I didn’t want to shoot,” Almond said. “But if I had to shoot, I wanted my shotgun.”
As an employee scrambled for the shotgun, Almond found the pistol.
“I knew if I got my hand on my pistol he was dead,” she said. “When I brought it up, it was ready to fire. He said, ‘Give it to me.’ I shot him. I’m just thankful I didn’t break any bottles. I know that’s callous, but he was wrong.”
The robber continued to reach for money and Almond grabbed a shotgun from her co-worker, laid it on the counter and shot him in the stomach.
“Nobody is ready to die,” she said, “especially at the hands of a cranked-up idiot.”
The shot sent the robber crashing through the door and into the store’s parking lot, with only his feet still on the front porch, a gun in one hand and a wad of 10-dollar bills in the other.
“All I could think of was, he’s down. I felt relief,” Almond said. “When I get in a crunch, I get calm. But I fall apart later.”
Two Hugo police officers responding to a 911 call arrived just in time to see the suspect coming out the front door.
The liquor store had been robbed before, but never with a gun, Bob Almond said.
Sheila Almond said she’s taking her liquor store employee out today to teach her how to shoot a gun. They’ll have to do it without “Baby,” though. The shotgun was confiscated by police.
