Anchorage Daily News

Benjamin Wallace Rucker nearly made a clean getaway, police say, after city snowplows covered the footprints leading away from the last vehicle stolen during a string of carjackings and robberies Tuesday night.

If only he hadn't dropped his wallet. With his photo ID.

"We would have caught him one way or the other," police Lt. Dave Parker said, "but it just made it so easy."

The series of robberies left a cab driver with slash wounds to his head and hands, a carjacking victim punched in the mouth and a pet dog that was in one of the stolen vehicles temporarily missing, according to police.

Rucker, 34, was arrested Thursday morning on six felony counts of robbery, assault and vehicle theft stemming from two episodes, and he is a suspect in a third. He was booked at the Anchorage jail on $50,000 bail.

Police suspect the rampage began with a downtown robbery of a Yellow Cab driver just before 10 p.m. Tuesday, when driver Harold Peaker was robbed of his cash, Parker said.

Peaker said he picked up a fare in front of the Avenue Bar on Fourth Avenue and two others at Fourth Avenue and Barrow Street. When he stopped the cab near 15th Avenue and Gambell Street, the two men in back started to get out but the man in the front seat demanded the money and made a grab for the car key, Peaker said.

"I put my hand on his and was trying to pull his hand off of that, and then he just started whaling on me," Peaker said. "He had a box cutter, and I got three cuts on my head that went all the way to my skull."

Peaker said he also received serious cuts to his hands and has a severely bruised head, injuries that landed him a daylong hospital stay. The assault ended when he threw his money to the floor. The robber grabbed it and ran off, he said.

"I was bleeding so bad I couldn't see," Peaker said. "I stood up and I could see two different people down about a half a block away, and I said to the one of them: 'I've just been robbed. Can you help me? I'm hurt bad.' The guy says, 'Uh, I don't have a cell phone.' He just walked on. I couldn't believe it."

Eventually another cab driver pulled up and called police, Peaker said. Peaker said he was initially unable to conclusively identify Rucker in a photo lineup because the attacker's appearance had changed. When he saw a different picture on the news, though, he was sure Rucker was the one, he said.

Parker said charges against Rucker for that case are being reviewed. Police are still trying to identify the other suspects, though with little help from Rucker, who "didn't have much to say" after his arrest, Parker said.

A few hours after Peaker's cab was robbed, at about 12:45 a.m., Jimmie Hoyt had his 1993 tan and gray Ford Explorer carjacked in the 800 block of West Seventh Avenue by two men, Parker said. The robbers punched Hoyt in the face as they forced him out of the vehicle and sped off with his Akita dog, Sox, still inside. The dog was later picked up in Mountain View by good Samaritans who reunited pet and owner Wednesday, Parker said.

Then, just before 2:45 a.m., a robber walked into the Tesoro gas station at 1940 Abbott Road claiming he had a gun and demanding cash, Parker said.

"He'd come in like a regular old customer and was just real nice," said Chyanne Borgen, a clerk at the store whose coworkers told her what happened. "They turned around for a second and the next thing they knew, he was behind the counter with a gun, said, 'Give me everything that you have.' "

The robber ran out with a small amount of cash and got into a vehicle with a woman, Borgen said. While fleeing the scene, though, the vehicle spun out and stalled in the middle of the road, Parker said.

"His driving skills are lacking," Parker said. The robber "couldn't drive the car away, apparently, so he decided to hijack another car and wasn't able to do that."

The suspect, accompanied by the still-unidentified woman, flagged down a passing green Ford Explorer, driven by David Dunsmore, and forced him out of the vehicle, Parker said. The vehicle, however, apparently had a manual transmission, which the robber may have been unfamiliar with, he said.

The vehicle died in the 1900 block of Abbott Road, next to Hoyt's vehicle that had stalled just moments before, and the robber took off running with his female companion. As police arrived, their footprints were already being covered by city snowplows clearing the roads, but the wallet broke the case, Parker said.

"Our big fear was that people would be afraid that there was some rampant wild bunch of people running around Anchorage doing crazy stuff," Parker said. "It turns out that at least most of the mayhem was one individual."

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.