If he had thought about it, Bobby Ray Mabe probably wouldn't have attacked the man trying to rob his store early Thursday.

But when a man holding something under his shirt asked for a Mountain Dew, then demanded money, a patron and Mabe grabbed him.

"If he had had a gun he would've shot me," Mabe said. "But he had a banana."

Mabe owns 109 Biz Center off Thomasville Road, a computer café that features sweepstakes games. Patrons buy sweepstakes cards, then find out on a computer whether they've won a cash prize.

When a man came in just after 1 and asked for the Mountain Dew, Mabe had just had to pay out $2,000 to a winner. Now someone was trying to take what little he had left.

"It just flew all over me, and I before I knew it, I had my hands on him," he said.

Mabe and the patron held the robber while they waited for the deputies to arrive. Meanwhile, the would-be robber ate the banana.

"And the deputy said, 'Ah hah! He ate the evidence,'" Mabe said. "But we had the banana peel and they took a picture of it."

John Steven Szwalla, 17, was charged with one count of attempted armed robbery. Warrants and records with the sheriff's office list different addresses for him, with a most recent address in Clemmons.


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Deputies joked about charging him with destroying evidence, said Major Brad Stanley, a spokesman for the Forsyth County Sheriff's office.

Szwalla is in the Forsyth County Jail with bond set at $50,000.