Police believe two men who have held up the same convenience store twice in two months live in the neighborhood and someone knows who they are.
“If they are not permanent residents, they are staying in the area,” Rome police detective Joe Costolnick said Saturday. “It appears they walked up on closing time and fled on foot and were not anywhere to be found a short time later.”
The clerk at the Big H convenience store, 20 E. Main St., was robbed again Friday by two men after being robbed on March 22.
The robberies have other similarities. They happened at the same time of night — around 11 p.m. At least one of the men had a big knife. And the clerk told Costolnick he knew that one of the suspects was the same because he had the same voice.
Police do not believe the robbery is related to one at the Big H at 127 E. 12th St. on April 3.
Costolnick said that, on Friday night, one of the robbers climbed over the counter with something that looked like a small baseball bat. The clerk tried to fight him off, but a second man — wearing dark clothes, bright white gloves and a white mask — arrived with a knife. The man in the white mask went straight to the back and turned off the lights, Costolnick said.
The two men got away with $600 to $700 in cash, some cigarettes and some beer, police said. Police brought out K-9s to search for the men but had no luck.
That has lead police to believe they are from the neighborhood surrounding the store.
Since the March robbery, police have been looking for suspects and have one identified. But they have not had enough to make an arrest. Costolnick believes someone has information that can crack the case.
“I believe they (the robbers) have talked about it,” he said. I believe there are people out there who know.”
Anyone with information is asked to call Costolnick at 706-238-5128 or he can be reached by email at jcostolnick@romepolice.com.

A good deluge of rain can lead to more than just the possibility of minor flooding along the rivers of Rome and Floyd County.
The huge influx of water is a precursor to persistent sewage spills that shine a light on the city’s sewer system.
According to the Rome Water and Sewer Division, more than a million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Etowah River during the recent heavy rains that caused area waterways to overflow their banks.
As the river rose, it covered a manhole near the southeast corner of the Coosa Valley Fairgrounds off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and caused a spill that lasted for nearly 12 days. It was finally cleared and corrected on May 11.
“That particular location seems to receive what we call a lot of ‘I and I’, or infiltration and inflow,” said Water and Sewer Director Leigh Ross, noting that it is the worst area for continuing sewer spills.
Infiltration occurs when groundwater seeps through the manholes and pipes while inflow is when water goes directly into the system.
“It is definitely rain-related,” Ross added. “It doesn’t overflow during periods of regular rain and is only a slight problem when we get heavy rain. But when rivers rise like they did, it is sustained.”
But despite the unusually high output of raw sewage into the river, Rome-Floyd Environmental Services Director Eric Lindberg said that there was never any major public health threat.
“The good news — if there is any with these type spills — is that it is happening when there are billions of gallons of water flowing down the Etowah at once,” Lindberg said. “So any sewage that does get into the water is greatly diluted.”

Click here for a previous report on sewage spilling into the Etowah River.

Click here for a sewer spill report.

He said a much greater threat would occur if a sewage spill went into the river during a drought. The Etowah was at around 24 feet for most of the first two weeks of May, just 4 feet short of the action stage when preparations for flooding are made.
Sewage treatment
The Etowah joins the Oostanaula River to form the Coosa River in downtown Rome. The water is treated a little farther downstream, at the Rome Water Reclamation Facility on Black’s Bluff Road.
“We’re dealing with a system that, at some parts, is 50 to 70 years old,” Ross said. “Our system is made up of very little modern materials, and it’s like that for cities everywhere.”
The Water and Sewer Division sent out a final report on the Etowah spill this past week, explaining some of the actions they plan to correct the problem in addition to monitoring the river for a year.
Among them was a 2014 budget allowance for a crew dedicated to inflow and infiltration reduction, and a 2013 SPLOST project submission to build a new lift station at the end of East Fourth Street near the Kingfisher Trail.
“That would be able to pump some of the flow that comes from the fairgrounds area, and push that water on over to the (sewer) main across the river,” Ross said. “That would be a help and decrease some of the overflow problem we have there.”
Lindberg said any sewer spill is taken seriously and its impact on both humans and nature are studied.
“A bigger reason spills are monitored and we try to avoid them is the effect they have on wildlife,” Lindberg said. “When sewage goes
into the water, it turns it into a breeding ground for aerobic bacteria, which take all of the oxygen out of the water and can lead to fish-kills.”