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loweringthebar_feed Oct. 31st, 2025 10:18 pm)
Upon reflection (and some email feedback) I have further thoughts about the reported aquatic escape of a robber who struck the Paddlefish restaurant at Walt Disney World last month. See “Was That Scuba Burglary a Successful Aquatic Escape?” (Oct. 24, 2025).
First, so far as I can tell there have been no further developments in the case since last week. I found no new references to it, and if anyone had been arrested, I’m pretty confident the Orange County Sheriff’s Office would have trumpeted that on its Facebook page. But all the recent posts there have to do with Halloween and the sheriff’s “Trunk’n’Treat” program, which seems to involve officers distributing candy from the trunks of their patrol cars. I’m fine with that, unless it’s a sting operation of some kind where they’re going to ask for people’s “papers” or check for outstanding warrants or something. I have no evidence of that at this time.
Second, those who wrote in to object to my classification of this escape as “not yet successful” … may have a point. He is gone, or at least his whereabouts are unknown, and it has been over six weeks now. I still like my eaten-by-alligator theory, but have to admit there is no evidence to support it. Some also pointed out that for there to be an “escape,” there really has to have been a pursuit, and that wasn’t the case here. He grabbed the cash and swam away before officers ever reached the scene. So this was more of a “getaway,” and again it does seem to have been successful at least for now. That too is a fair point.
I suppose the problem was really that this episode was just not in the same category as most of the others I’ve been talking about. The real point there is to encourage people who are actually being chased by law enforcement to stop plunging or jumping into some body of water, which is only going to slow you down and possibly put you and officers at risk. Even if you do have some kind of flotation device, they’re almost certain to have a better one, or they can just wait you out. One of my earliest mentions of this phenomenon, for example, involved someone (also in Florida) who tried to escape a foot pursuit by stealing a pedal boat. See “Sinking Pedal Boat Ends Ridiculous Escape Attempt” (Jan. 28, 2010). To catch him they only had to upgrade to a pontoon boat (with an engine, granted). So not only do you still end up in custody, you have the embarrassment factor of being apprehended by a pontoon boat.
But again, that was an “escape” attempt, not a carefully planned getaway, so it fits. The scuba-guy Disney robbery really doesn’t. Fair enough.
This assumes, of course, that there really was a getaway at all. Several experts, and by “experts” I mean random yahoos who posted something on a Disney-related message board I found, have suggested that maybe there wasn’t. As I suggested last time, there is already some reason to believe this was some sort of inside job, given the robber’s apparent knowledge of when and where the employees would be counting the day’s cash. And while a security camera showed the robber arriving, he blinded that camera with spray paint and so it didn’t seem him leave. We only have the other employees’ word for the getaway part of this, in other words, so maybe he just made a big entrance and then hid in the pantry or something until the coast was clear.
Again, this is utter speculation by me and the (other) random yahoos, and not to be taken as suggesting that there’s any evidence of such a conspiracy. Will I take credit for the idea later if it turns out to be true? Probably. But right now, utter speculation.
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