A phone-tracking app, police K-9 and footprints in fresh snow helped St. Paul police track two thieves accused of robbing a man on Selby Avenue at knifepoint earlier this month, according to criminal charges.
The man waited for his wife and friend to meet him outside Moscow on the Hill restaurant around 12:40 a.m. Dec. 1 when two men approached him and demanded his belongings.
One of them held a large knife, according to criminal charges.
After snatching the man’s cellphone from his jacket pocket, the two assailants took off running west on Selby in the Cathedral Hill area.
The man’s friend called police and told officers they were able to track the stolen cellphone’s locations with an app.
Police arrived at the scene, and, using the phone-tracking technology, a police dog and following two sets of footprints in the fresh snow, officers homed in on the back of an apartment building on the 600 block of Dayton Avenue, according to the charges.
Then officers saw a man come down the stairs from the second floor of the building and throw a phone out. The phone ended up being the one stolen, authorities say.
Police entered the building and as they arrived at the door, they could hear furniture being barricaded inside, according to the charges.
Eventually a woman said she would open the door, and Adeyemi Dean, 47, and Jonathan Alexander Rose, 38, came out.
Police brought the man who said he had been robbed to the apartment, and he identified the two as the men who robbed him, according to charges filed Wednesday in Ramsey County District Court.
Each was charged via warrant with one count of first-degree aggravated robbery.
No attorney was listed for them in court records.