BUFFALO, N.Y. — A Tonawanda woman has now been sentenced for a second time for being the getaway driver in a robbery spree earlier this year.
Heather Jenkins pleaded guilty to assisting her husband rob convenience stores, leaving store clerks traumatized.
The robbery spree had police on their toes for months. A man in a ski mask robbing stores with a BB gun.
Behind that mask was Justin Jenkins of the Town of Tonawanda.
He knocked off stores from Wheatfield to Tonawanda, Kenmore and Amherst.
In total, he stole from six stores in Erie County. On three of those occasions, his wife, Heather Jenkins waited outside as the getaway driver.
"I do feel horrible for the clerk. I do. I feel horrible for my daughter, what I put her through, and my family. I do feel really horrible. This is not who I am," Jenkins said during her sentencing.
She says that her husband was violent toward her and that she was scared to go to police.
"I was afraid of what would've happened," she said.
But prosecutors weren't buying her story and asked Judge John Michalski to give Heather Jenkins state prison time.
"In my experience, that's not the case here, she does not present as a domestic violence victim to me," assistant district attorney Rachel Newton said. "She chose to repeatedly traumatize store clerk after store clerk. In fact, she facilitated a robbery where her husband pointed a gun at a mother and a small child in a vehicle."
Prosecutors say the robbery spree all came to an end earlier this year, when Town of Tonawanda police caught the two robbing a store.
Heather Jenkins has already been sentenced in Niagara County to five years probation.
And on Friday in Erie County Court, she got the same sentence. Both will be served at the same time.
"I don't think it's an unreasonable sentence to place Ms. Jenkins on probation with respect to these Erie County convictions," Michalski said.
Justin Jenkins is serving a 20-year prison sentence for leading this robbery spree.