Steve Martin, the owner of Pizza Express, said Jones, wearing a ski mask, walked into the restaurant, demanded cash and threatened that he had a gun.
Buckner, who witnessed everything through a door on the kitchen window, decided that — as he put it — “something had to be done.”
Using a side door that leads from the restaurant’s kitchen to the dining room, Buckner was able to sneak up on Jones from behind.
“He had his back to me, so I struck him in the back of the head and wrestled him to the ground,” Buckner said. “I knew that he was lying about the gun at that point because he had his hands up.”
When officers arrived, the 33-year-old Jones was restrained on the floor of the dining room.
Kettering police confirmed that Jones fit the description of the man who had robbed a United Dairy Farmers on Stroop Road earlier that evening. In addition to other identifiers, he has a large tattoo of a swastika on the top of his head.
“He’s a hero as far as I’m concerned,” Martin said of Buckner. “I don’t know what made him do it. I just know that after it was over, I shook his hand and told him thank you.”
But Buckner does not recommend others try to do what he did. “It could have ended really differently,” he said.
Jones was charged with two counts of robbery and drug possession.
He is being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $100,000 bond.
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