Reported Robbery Actually Reenactment of Reliable Pharmacy Robbery

A caller to 911 reported a robbery at Reliable Pharmacy
on Sunday afternoon.  The man on the
phone told dispatchers he saw men with ski masks entering the pharmacy as he
drove by.  The caller says one of the men
had a gun. 

It was a description of a scene eerily similar to the
robbery that put Reliable Pharmacy on the front pages when an armed robbery
ended with one of the would-be robbers dead. 
In fact, it was exactly like that. 

The new defense team for Jerome Ersland, the pharmacist
now serving life for murdering one of the Reliable Pharmacy robbers, staged a
recreation this weekend as part of his appeal. 
Ersland’s attorney, Doug Friesen says he has been working on getting
evidence ready in hopes the Court of Criminal Appeals will grant an evidentiary
hearing to view evidence the jury in Ersland’s original trial never saw. 

Friesen says the recreation was an attempt to show what
Ersland saw during the robbery.  The
scene was intended to be a first-person look from the moment the robbers
knocked on the pharmacy door until just after Ersland fired the five final shots
into body of one of the robbers. 

Friesen says they hired an off-duty deputy to do security
and were using toy guns.  They said they
intended to notify police before they took their filming outside the pharmacy,
but someone saw the set up and got worried. 
Friesen says the caller did exactly what he would hope anyone would
do.  He’s also pleased with the response
by Oklahoma City police.

Ersland is awaiting a ruling by the court to determine if
he received proper representation during his first trial that ended with the
murder conviction. 

Posted: Monday, November 26 2012, 04:10 PM CST