Robbery Suspect Tracked by GPS in Pill Bottle

Welcome to the 21st Century. The police are now giving pharmacies dummy bottles of OxyContin, a seriously addictive pain reliever, that are instead filled with GPS tracking devices. Seems that a lot of thieves love to break into pharmacies, grab the stuff and then sell it on the black market.  The maker of the drug, Purdue Pharma, decided that it would be a good idea to distribute these dummy bottles to police departments around the country and the police are just tickled to death.

The fake bottles don't just contain a GPS tracking gizmo. The bottles are weighted and rattle when shaken, so a thief does not initially realize they do not contain pills. Each of the decoy bottles sits atop a special base, and when the bottle is lifted from the base, the GPS device is turned on and begins to emit a tracking signal. 

Nationwide, according to Purdue spokesman, James W. Heins, the decoy bottles have “assisted in the arrest of 111 pharmacy robbery suspects across the country, some of whom have been implicated in multiple pharmacy robberies.” He added that the bottle-tracking program had been used in 33 states so far.

Last Friday at about 1:30 p.m., a HealthSource drugstore in New York City was robbed and one of the bottles the thief took was one of the decoy bottles with a GPS tracker inside. It didn't take police long to catch up with  the suspect, Scott Kato, 45, of Mount Vernon, N.Y., who was believed to have also robbed pharmacies in New York City on at least four other occasions since 2011. Kato and the GPS tracker were confronted a few hours later as his 2007 Jeep was stuck in traffic on a service road at East 96th Street. As officers closed in, Kato reportedly pointed a handgun in the direction of at least one of the officers; one or more of the officers opened fire, and he was killed. The episode is the first known case in New York City in which a decoy bottle helped the police identify a suspect after a pharmacy robbery.