Dairy owner has bottle to take on robbers

Milesh Kumar hurled a bottle of fizzy drink at one of the armed women trying to rob his superette. Photo / Alan Gibson

A dairy owner and his wife fended off armed robbers with tins of coconut cream and a bottle of Sparkling Lime.

Milesh Kumar says he always thought he would follow the correct protocol and let robbers take whatever they wanted, but when he heard his wife scream, he couldn't help but react.

His Rotorua superette was stormed by two women clad in black hoodies, one carrying a knife and the other a steel rod.

Mr Kumar was by the soft drinks while his wife, Manisha, was out of sight in an aisle picking up some coconut cream for dinner.

She screamed and he immediately grabbed what was in front of him - a 1.5-litre plastic bottle of fizzy drink.

"I didn't know if she had been stabbed already," he said.

Mrs Kumar ran and her husband hurled the bottle at one of the women.

The store's panic alarm began to blare and soon Mr Kumar was chasing the robbers out the door, with his wife also throwing tins after them.

Mr Kumar said it happened so fast he could not even remember if the bottle he threw had connected - he was just glad he and his wife had got themselves out of trouble.

"The policy was to let them take anything, but it all changes when you hear your wife scream. It all goes out the door, and you just act on instinct," Mr Kumar said.

He knew the official advice was that he could put himself in harm's way by fighting back.

"You don't know what the outcome will be, if you will get stabbed or how long they will stay. You don't know what's happening in their minds."

And if anyone got hurt he was likely to be taken to court, he said, which would cost much more than any stolen cash and goods.

"Legal costs would be a lot more than what the burglars could take. That's the cheapest part," he said.

"It's hard when they know you can't protect yourself ... The system is stacked against you.

"Every corner superette has the same situation and so many get targeted, every year, in any area you go to," Mr Kumar said.

He wanted politicians to take action to protect small business owners, he said.

"It's getting worse by the day. Hold ups have always happened, but they're getting serious. Now even if you do everything as they tell you there's no guarantee that you will survive."

For a law change to get traction, judges, lawyers and MPs needed to go through the experience, he said.

"Put judges and parliamentarians through it and see how fast they change the law."

There may be no easy solution, but he said it felt like criminals were better protected than dairy owners.

"Maybe we should have kept the can to display as a warning: if you attack, we'll use missiles."

The hardest part was returning to the store the next day.

"You can't walk away when something like this happens. It's traumatic. Every time someone walks in you think, is he going to rob me?"

Mr Kumar said he knew many dairy owners who had sold up after an armed robbery. "My wife is too traumatised to be alone, but what do you do? It's a family business."