A gas station attendant at the Sunoco on Prospect Avenue in West Orange was held up at gunpoint late Wednesday night by two men who sped off with approximately $650 in a red Dodge Durango with no license plates. Police say the attendant had approached the vehicle at a fuel pump around 10:54 p.m. when a passenger brandished a firearm and demanded cash while the driver stayed behind the wheel.
According to RLS Media, West Orange police responded to the station at 480 Prospect Avenue after the robbery and found the suspects already gone, last seen heading southbound on Prospect Avenue toward Mount Pleasant Avenue. Officers canvassed the surrounding area and obtained surveillance footage as part of the ongoing investigation, though no arrests have been announced and police say the case remains active. Authorities said the incident poses no ongoing threat to public safety.
A Familiar Vehicle in Essex County's Recent Crime Pattern
The description of the getaway car echoes an overnight robbery spree that rattled Essex County less than four weeks earlier. On September 21, police across the county were alerted to a string of robberies targeting gas stations and businesses, with suspects in a red Dodge Durango fleeing toward West Orange after an armed robbery on Central Avenue in neighboring Orange, according to RLS Media. Preliminary reports from that spree noted at least one firearm displayed during the multi-town run of robberies, though it remains unclear whether that vehicle and Wednesday night's Durango are connected.
The gas station targeted, Essex Green Sunoco, has operated at the Prospect Avenue address since April 1975, per the Better Business Bureau, which lists the business as a sole proprietorship offering fuel and auto repair. The corridor has seen armed robbery prosecutions before: in November 2015, an Essex County jury convicted a suspect on first-degree robbery charges after a gunpoint robbery on nearby Mount Pleasant Avenue, where a victim was threatened with a handgun in a commercial parking lot, according to the Essex County Prosecutor's Office.
Why New Jersey's Gas Pumps Put Attendants at Risk
New Jersey remains the only state in the country that bans drivers from pumping their own gas, a rule dating back to the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act of 1949 that requires stations to keep attendants working the pumps. Station owners who fail to staff attendants face fines starting at $250 for a first offense and rising to $500 for repeat violations, according to the Knee Regulatory Research Center. The staffing mandate means attendants are routinely exposed outdoors to cash transactions with unfamiliar vehicles late into the night, a dynamic that was on full display in Wednesday's robbery.
A December 2025 study by Rutgers University–Newark researchers found that commercial venues operating late hours in Essex County face persistent violent crime risks around the clock, driven in part by easy site access and fast vehicular escape routes. Still, armed robberies of this kind remain relatively rare in West Orange specifically: FBI data analyzed by Patch showed the township recorded 17 robberies and 16 aggravated assaults in 2024, keeping its violent crime rate well below state and national averages.
Potential Penalties if Suspects Are Caught
Under New Jersey law, a robbery committed while armed with or threatening the immediate use of a deadly weapon is graded as a first-degree crime, carrying a sentence of 10 to 20 years in state prison, according to Justia Law. Anyone convicted would also fall under New Jersey's No Early Release Act, which requires those convicted of violent first-degree crimes like armed robbery to serve at least 85% of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole, per the Law Office of Anthony J. Vecchio.
West Orange police have recent experience untangling multi-town armed robbery cases. In August, the department assisted a regional SWAT team and multi-county authorities in executing search warrants that led to three arrests and the recovery of an unserialized ghost gun, part of a five-defendant manhunt tracked across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For now, investigators have not said whether Wednesday's robbery is linked to that case or to September's regional spree, and anyone with information is encouraged to contact West Orange police as the investigation continues.
