HARRIS COUNTY – A Tomball second grader is the first to alert a convenience store full of customers about a robbery Thursday night.
"He yelled, 'Robbers! robbers!' really loud and he yelled it before they even came through the door, so that gave us the heads-up pretty much," the boy's mother, Amy Counts said.
Surveillance video shows the boy, 7, wearing a baseball uniform, scrambling away from the three masked men with guns.
Counts and her son have a tradition of going to Sonny's convenience store on 2920 after a baseball game win.
"I just kept telling him, 'Its OK Its OK,' and just kept my arms around him didn't want to let him go at all," Counts said.
It was the second store the men targeted Thursday, police said.
Tomball police and Precinct 4 deputies spent part of Friday looking for the men who apparently went on a robbery spree Thursday night.
Kristen Dowell said she was waiting for her boyfriend at a Shamrock gas station off Boudreaux Road and Shannon Parkway around 9:35 p.m.
When she realized her boyfriend was being robbed at gunpoint inside the store, she rushed in to help.
"My boyfriend was being held down, so I got out of the car," said Dowell. "I was like,'Let my boyfriend go, let my boyfriend go!' They pointed the gun right at me and shot at the window. I knew he was going to shoot and I ducked and one of the glass pieces hit me in the cheek."
The robbers were wearing masks and hoodies in both robberies, according to investigators.
"Just the fact that there were patrons at all inside the store is concerning," said Robert Hauck with the Tomball Police Department. "But here you have this boy, you see him right there in the video in his baseball uniform, he is the first one who sees these guys running at him at the door with the gun and then he runs back inside."
In both cases, investigators said the men stole cash and cigarettes.
So far, none of the men are in police custody.
If you have information about the men, you can provide the info anonymously to Crime Stoppers of Houston at 713-222-TIPS.