Prince George's County police investigate armed robbery at Royal Farms store
A Royal Farms robbery in Landover sent county police and aviation units after a suspect who fled toward Pennsy Drive. No arrest had been made as investigators weighed a broader retail-theft pattern.
An armed robbery at a Royal Farms in Landover sent Prince George’s County police and aviation support searching for a suspect who ran toward Pennsy Drive early July 2. Officers responded around 1 a.m. to the 8200 block of Ardwick Ardmore Road, and no suspect was in custody as the investigation continued.
The store is listed at 8211 Ardwick Ardmore Rd. in Hyattsville, placing it in the same busy northern county commercial corridor where overnight convenience stores draw late-shift workers, delivery traffic and customers looking for food, fuel and quick service after dark. Police said the male suspect was last seen on foot, a detail that helps explain why the search expanded from the store lot and surrounding blocks to an aerial response.
Aviation support is often used when a suspect disappears into nearby streets, parking lots or wooded edges and officers need a wider view than ground units can get at street level. In this case, the suspect’s flight toward Pennsy Drive created a moving search area in the Landover-Hyattsville corridor, where visibility can be limited by the layout of commercial strips and side roads.
The case also fits a broader run of robbery investigations involving Royal Farms and other businesses in Prince George’s County. Recent incidents have included a Royal Farms robbery in Camp Springs and an attempted robbery in Landover in September 2025, underscoring that retail crime remains a recurring public-safety problem for overnight stores across the county.
Royal Farms operates nearly 300 stores across Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia and North Carolina, making it one of the most visible convenience-store chains in the region. In Prince George’s County, the stakes are high for employees working alone or in small crews during the overnight hours, when cash drawers are open and police calls can turn fast.
Prince George’s County Police says it is the fourth largest law enforcement agency in Maryland, with more than 1,500 officers and 300 civilians serving nearly 900,000 residents and business owners. The size of the department gives it the manpower to launch air support and foot searches, but the robbery in Landover still leaves the same basic question for officials: how quickly can they turn a response into an arrest, and how much patrol coverage can they sustain around the county’s late-night retail corridors?
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
