Foley Police Arrest Two Suspects in Dollar General Armed Robbery

Foley Police have identified and arrested the suspects in the armed robbery of a Dollar General store, crediting tips from residents who helped during the investigation. Arnold Gillard, 22, of Daphne and John Matthew Oshinski, 28, also of Daphne, are in custody and will be charged with robbery in the first degree, according to Foley PD. Investigators also recovered the gun used in the robbery along with the stolen merchandise.

The case moved from robbery to arrests in a matter of days, a speed investigators attributed directly to the public. Foley Police said they want to thank the public and everyone involved for helping rapidly resolve the case and arrest the suspects — a pointed acknowledgment that the tips called in by residents gave detectives what they needed to put names to a masked surveillance image.

What happened at the store

The robbery happened around 2 p.m. Thursday at the Dollar General near the intersection of Highway 59 and Satsuma Avenue, a stretch of the highway that cuts through the heart of Foley and carries some of the heaviest retail traffic in southern Baldwin County. Investigators said a man pulled out a semi-automatic handgun and left with cash, Mountain Dew and other items.

He walked out of the store and got into the passenger side of a large gray pickup truck, a detail that indicated at least one other person was involved and waiting outside. The suspect was captured on surveillance cameras inside the store, and police described him as a white man about 5-foot-4 with a medium build, short dark hair and a light beard and mustache, last seen wearing a gray Alabama hoodie and sunglasses.

Armed robbery in the middle of a Thursday afternoon — with employees, customers and passersby all around — is exactly the kind of crime that surveillance and public tips tend to solve quickly. The store’s camera system recorded the suspect’s face and clothing clearly enough for police to release a description, and once that description circulated, the tips started arriving.

The investigation, tip by tip

Foley investigators used the surveillance footage, the description and the getaway vehicle information to build the case, and the tips from residents helped connect the pieces to the two Daphne men now in custody. Detective work in retail robberies typically follows that path: cameras establish what happened and when, the public fills in who, and the arrest follows once the identities are confirmed.

The recovery of both the semi-automatic handgun and the stolen merchandise removed the two most important pieces of evidence from circulation. Recovering the weapon matters especially in an armed robbery case, where the firearm is central to the charge, and getting it off the street eliminates any chance it turns up in another crime while the case is pending.

Both suspects face first-degree robbery charges, a Class A felony under Alabama law that applies when a perpetrator is armed with a deadly weapon during the offense. Convictions carry sentences that can extend from decades to life in prison, and the charge reflects the fact that a gun was displayed during a theft — the line that separates robbery from ordinary theft under Alabama’s criminal code.

Why public tips decide cases like this one

The Foley department’s emphasis on thanking the public reflects how modern retail robbery investigations actually close. Police departments across Baldwin County routinely release surveillance stills and descriptions within hours of a robbery, and the flow of tips that follows — phone calls, social media messages, anonymous tip lines — is frequently what moves a case from a face on a screen to a name in an arrest report.

Residents who had seen the gray pickup truck, recognized the description or connected the suspects to the area had information detectives could not have generated from the store footage alone. Investigators stress that even partial tips — a vehicle seen in the area, a name mentioned in conversation — can be the piece that completes a case, and the department’s statement made clear that is what happened here.

The speed of the resolution also carries a practical safety benefit. Two men willing to walk into a store and display a handgun at 2 p.m. presented an ongoing risk as long as they were free, and every day a case like this stays open is a day the same actors can commit another offense. Closing it within days took that risk off the street.

The Highway 59 corridor and Foley retail

The robbery site sits along US Highway 59, the main north-south artery through Foley and the road that carries beach traffic between Interstate 10 and the Gulf Shores-Orange Beach corridor to the south. The highway’s commercial strips — anchored by the Tanger Outlets complex and a dense run of retail and restaurants — mean the store’s parking lot sees steady traffic through the day, particularly in the afternoon hours when the robbery occurred.

Foley, one of the fastest-growing cities in Baldwin County, has seen its retail footprint expand along with its population, and stores along the 59 corridor are among the busiest in south Alabama. Dollar General stores, which operate thousands of locations across the country and dozens across Baldwin and Mobile counties, anchor shopping in many neighborhoods, and their extended hours and small staffs make them a recurring target for retail robberies nationally — a pattern that puts a premium on surveillance systems and rapid police response.

The Foley Police Department, which serves a city that has grown rapidly in recent decades, works retail corridors like Highway 59 daily, and its investigators have developed the routine of pairing camera evidence with public appeals — a combination that paid off in this case.

What happens next

With Gillard and Oshinski in custody and the charges set, the case moves to the court system, where first-degree robbery prosecutions hinge on the evidence now in hand: store surveillance showing the handgun and the take, the recovered weapon, the recovered merchandise and the getaway vehicle information. Both men, as adults, face the full weight of a Class A felony charge in the Alabama court system, with proceedings in Baldwin County.

The driver of the gray pickup truck, if a third person was involved, remains a question the arrest records did not answer publicly, but investigators recovered the evidence needed for the charges that were filed. Anyone with additional information about the case can still contact the Foley Police Department, and departments generally keep such cases open to additional tips even after arrests are made.

A reminder for store employees and residents

Cases like this one underscore the safety guidance police repeat after every retail robbery: comply with a robber’s demands, stay calm, observe what you can — descriptions, direction of travel, vehicle — and call 911 the moment it is safe. No amount of cash or merchandise is worth confronting an armed suspect, and the safest outcomes are the ones where employees and customers stay out of the way and let cameras and witnesses do the work.

For residents, the Foley case is equally clear proof that calling in a tip matters. The two arrests, the recovered gun and the recovered merchandise all trace back to a chain that began with store cameras and ran through the residents who picked up the phone. Police across Baldwin County repeat the invitation after every case like this one: if you saw something, say something — the investigation ends faster when you do.

The Foley Police Department thanked the public and everyone involved in the case for helping bring it to a rapid close, a reminder that in a growing city with busy corridors and thousands of daily visitors, the community’s eyes remain the department’s most valuable investigative asset.

The geography of the case also illustrates how Baldwin County investigations cross city lines. The suspects live in Daphne, the crime happened in Foley, and the evidence trail ran between them — the kind of multi-jurisdiction case that depends on agencies sharing camera footage, warrant paperwork and suspect information quickly. Baldwin County departments work those handoffs routinely, aided by the countywide mutual aid relationships and the Baldwin County Major Crimes Unit, which stands ready to assist when a case exceeds a single department’s resources.

For the neighborhood around the store, the arrests brought the episode full circle within days. Employees who were working the Thursday afternoon shift got their routines back, customers returned, and the parking lot that briefly became a crime scene went back to being a parking lot. That return to normal is the outcome every rapid robbery investigation is chasing, and in this case the combination of cameras, good police work and residents willing to pick up the phone delivered it in short order — a result the Foley Police Department was explicit in attributing to the community that helped them get there.