Face tattoos and blood lead to Halifax gas station robber: ‘I need money! Give me money’

As if his face tattoos weren’t enough, a Halifax robber armed with a hammer managed to leave a sample of his own blood at the crime scene.

Though he did try to clean it up.

It was about an hour after sunrise on June 25, 2023, when a clerk at the Petro-Canada on Bayers Road hit the panic button. Rajpreet Singh was working alone, and the store associated with the gas station wasn’t slated to open for another 20 minutes.

“The Petro Canada store doesn’t open until 7 a.m., and therefore the front doors were closed and locked,” Halifax Regional Police Det.-Const. Amy Edwards said in a warrant application.

Singh spotted a white man walking outside wearing dark blue coveralls and a medical mask, Edwards said.

‘Smash the glass’

“Singh witnessed this same male walk up to the front door, smash the glass out of the door with a hammer and enter the store through the hole in the glass,” she said.

“The male then held the hammer in a threatening manner toward Rajpreet Singh and stated: ‘I need money! Give me money.’”

The store clerk could see the robber had cut his hand on the broken glass of the door and the wound was bleeding, said the investigator.

“The male took two zip lock bags from on top of the safe, containing $100 and concealed them in his coveralls; the male brought two re-usable grocery bags into the store with him and began filling them with cigarettes, taking 83 packs.”

Hand sanitizer

The clerk watched as the cut on the robber’s right hand dripped blood on the store counter and on to the floor, Edwards said, noting the bleeding was also caught on surveillance video.

“The male also saw this and squirted hand sanitizer onto to the blood on the counter and attempted to wipe it with his sleeve,” said the detective, noting that the clerk also mentioned the robber was not wearing gloves.

The robber wore a Carhartt sweater with the company’s name printed on the left arm. He also “had a face tattoo on the upper portion of his right cheek that could be seen sticking out above the medical mask.”

The clerk described the robber as about five-foot-nine, between the ages of 25 and 35, with a thin build.

Police checked with their own prisoner-care facility, learning “that only one male matched that description and was identified as Jacob Nagle-Cummings,” Edwards said.

Previous day

The Petro-Canada’s manager provided investigators with surveillance video of the same man shot the day before the robbery “when he came into the store without a mask on,” said the detective. “She was working on the previous day and confirmed that the male that robbed the store is the same male that was in the day prior.”

Police distributed still photos taken from the surveillance video to all the city’s cops. “I spoke with Detective Constable Robbie Baird (who) requested to view the surveillance video from the robbery,” said Edwards, noting Baird identified the man as Nagle-Cummings “as he knows him on a personal level and has interacted with him numerous times.”

Edwards found photos of her suspect’s tattoos that were shot by jail guards while he was in jail.

On top of that, she managed to track down his Facebook profile, finding photos that matched those taken in jail. “I also compared the tattoos with the surveillance video from the robbery and they match the suspect’s tattoos.”

An officer from the forensic identification section “collected several droplets of blood” from the robbery scene and submitted them to a lab for DNA analysis, Edwards said. “He fingerprinted and photographed the scene and seized several items for further examination.”

Edwards convinced a justice of the peace to grant her a warrant to take blood samples from Nagle-Cummings, who is 29. The detective wanted to compare the blood she eventually took from him on Sept. 20, 2023, with the drops found at the robbery scene.

Spring sentencing 

Nagle-Cummings has been found guilty of robbery, break and enter with intent, wearing a mask to commit an indictable offence and breaching probation. All those charges have an offence date of June 25, 2023.

He’s slated to be sentenced March 25 in Halifax provincial court.

On a separate matter, Nagle-Cummings was also found guilty of assault and is scheduled to appear in Pictou provincial court on Jan. 29 to set a sentencing date.

Betwen 2014 and 2021, Nova Scotia judges have sentenced Nagle-Cummings for 25 crimes, including mischief, assault, aggravated assault, theft, weapons offences, and resisting a peace officer.