Three High School Seniors Charged in Armed Robbery

Three seniors from Huntingtown High School were charged as adults with armed robbery and first-degree assault last week after holding up another Calvert County teenager in his home, law enforcement and school officials said.

Robert Dredger, 17, and John Obal, 18, both from Chesapeake Beach, along with Ali Moasser, 17, from Huntingtown, are accused of carrying out a robbery with a 20-gauge shotgun on Wednesday to take a laptop computer, a cellphone and a wooden box from the Huntingtown home of 18-year-old Ryan Dailey, according to the Calvert Investigative Team.

In an unrelated incident about 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, two masked men carrying handguns entered the BB&T Bank in Dunkirk, forced seven or eight employees into the vault and stole money from the teller drawers and the ATM, police said.

Calvert law enforcement officers said the armed robberies exemplify a disturbing trend. In 2005, the number of such robberies in Calvert doubled, rising to 26 from 13 the previous year. Breaking and entering, larceny and motor vehicle theft also rose.

The robbery in Huntingtown occurred about 3 p.m. as Dailey and his friend Dredger were watching television in his second-floor bedroom while another friend talked on the phone in the downstairs recreation room, according to charging documents. The friend downstairs yelled that two men were running toward the house with ski masks, police said. The masked men went upstairs, pointed a shotgun at Dailey's face and stole a Hewlett Packard laptop, a Verizon cellphone and a wooden box, according to charging documents. Moasser held the shotgun, Dailey told police.

As the robbers left in a green Ford Explorer, Dailey wrote down the license plate number, and police were able to track down the suspects. The Explorer was registered to Obal, according to documents. The laptop was found in a vehicle driven by Dredger, who initially told police he had managed to get the computer back and was going to return it to Dailey, but later admitted to police that he helped plan the robbery, according to documents. His role was to send a text message to Obal telling him when to come to the house and how many people were there, charging documents said.

The robbery was intended to help a friend in financial trouble, Obal told police.

In addition to armed robbery and first-degree assault, the three teenagers were charged as adults with reckless endangerment, first-degree burglary and theft over $500. The longest maximum sentence, for the assault charge, is 25 years in prison, according to charging documents. The three suspects were each released on $25,000 bond.

Calvert public schools Superintendent J. Kenneth Horsmon said that as of Friday the students had not been formally suspended and that school system officials were in discussions with their parents.

"We have a crime in the community, but kids are still entitled to educational services, though they don't necessarily have to be in the traditional school setting," he said.

Women who answered phone calls to the homes of Dredger and Obal declined to comment. Moasser could not be reached Friday.

Statistics in the recently released summary of the state's Uniform Crime Report showed that the number of Calvert crimes rose 19.6 percent in 2005 from the previous year, the largest such increase in the state. The listed crimes in Charles rose 1.8 percent in 2005; crime in St. Mary's was up 4.6 percent.