Bigga Pineapple drink snared Birmingham gang thug

Sep 6 2009 by Mark Cowan, Sunday Mercury

THUG Ojay Miller made one ‘Bigga’ mistake when he tossed a bottle of a pineapple flavoured soft drink away.

The discarded pop led detectives straight to the 19 year-old who was a member of a violent gang of armed robbers leaving a trail of terror across the West Midlands.

Cops found the bottle of Bigga Pineapple outside a McDonalds in Telford, Shropshire.

The restaurant had earlier been targeted by three masked robbers wielding knives, one of which turned out to be Miller.

Forensics experts found Miller’s DNA on the neck of the bottle.

And as detectives investigated the thug’s background they found links to his fellow robbers Valtie Dixon and Nyah Williams, both 21, who had joined him in the McDonalds raid.

Their faces hidden behind masks, the violent trio had burst into the restaurant on March 23 last year, terrorising a young family who had been enjoying a meal.

They vaulted the counter before threatening the manager at knifepoint, forcing him to hand over £5,000 in takings.

Footage from CCTV cameras showed that moments before the raid, Miller had finished the pineapple soft drink and thrown the bottle on the ground.

After the DNA breakthrough, officers painstakingly examined CCTV around Miller’s Birmingham home in Highgate Street, Highgate, and checked all his mobile phone calls.

Among his phone messages they found a text from Dixon about getting “tooled up”.

Miller claimed in interview this was a reference to buying condoms.

But as police investigations continued they soon discovered that Miller, Dixon and Williams had links to a wider group of criminal suspects.

All the robberies connected to Miller and the rest of the gang shared common features.

Between three and five men would burst into a retail outlet and threaten staff with weapons including hammers, knives and, in the early raids, a hand-held electric stun gun.

They stopped using the stun gun after it was accidentally left at the scene of one of the robberies.