Murray, Utah

From Salt Lake City’s KSL.com of May 22, 2007

Pharmacist Wards Off Robber with Gun

A thief handed a note demanding Oxycontin over the counter of a Murray pharmacy, but the pharmacist had a surprise under the counter.

"I just pulled a gun on him and said 'get out of here," Rod Dunn tells KSL. Pharmacist Rod Dunn is tired of getting robbed for pills, and he's not going to take it any more, so he used a gun to protect his pharmacy and employees.

It happened at Millcreek Pharmacy, a family-owned and run business. The man who tried to rob them quickly learned not to mess with this pharmacy.

Rod Dunn has been robbed before, he says, about 20 times. It's why he made the counters tall and deep and the enclosures high. "So we can just step this way and we'll be out of their sight," he said.

It's also why he has a gun. Just over a week ago, he pulled it out on Joseph Chiazzese, who had come into the pharmacy, left, then came back.

Dunn said, "We could see him on the camera - hoodie, dark glasses, cotton gloves - so we knew something was up."

Chiazzese slipped a note on the counter that read 'Oxycontin.' Behind the enclosure Rod started yelling, then, he says, "I just pulled a gun on him and said, ‘get out of here,' and he took off and I started yelling after him."

Armed with a golf club, Dunn's son Jason, went after him. "The whole time I was running after him, thought he had hurt someone or shot someone, and there was no way I was letting him get away," Jason said.

Jason saw Chiazzese drop his knife and tackled him on 1300 East. "At one point he kept saying, ‘you gotta let me go.' When I had him down on the corner with the golf club over him, he was telling me, ‘my wife's going to leave me,' whatever."

In a head lock, Jason dragged Chiazzese back to the pharmacy, where police arrested him.

Murray police detective Kenny Bass said, "Normally we would tell people not to go after them. Looking back at this one, everything worked out well."

The Dunn's will do this again because they don't want to get robbed again. They hope word gets out to leave their pharmacy alone.

Joseph Chiazzese was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail, and we've learned he has since been released.