Something's Afoot: Podiatrist Cracks Tennessee Robbery

WAYNESBORO, TN -- A beer store stick-up in a small Tennessee county is believed to be the first crime solved with the use of forensic podiatry.

On Jan. 4, 2017, three men entered Berry's Package Store in Cypress Inn, Tenn., a tiny unincorporated town along the Natchez Trace Parkway just north of the Alabama line 120 miles southwest of Nashville. One of the armed trio hit the store's owner with a gun before robbing the store. The whole incident took 98 seconds.

The men wore masks and gloves and left no fingerprints or DNA and none of the witnesses saw the suspects' faces.

What investigators did have was surveillance footage and one deputy noticed that one of the thieves had a "distinct walk" that looked similar to a customer who had visited the store the day before, Wayne County Sheriff Ric Wilson told WKRN.

The sheriff told Fox 17 one of his detectives read about "gait analysis," a forensic technique that had been used in English prosecutions, but, so far as anyone could tell, never in the United States. The sheriff contacted Michael Nirenberg, an eight-time winner of "Best Podiatrist in Northwest Indiana." Nirenberg had been used as an expert in personal injury and malpractice cases and had analyzed footprints in criminal cases, but this was another matter.

Nirenberg reviewed tape of the hold-up and of the customer from the day before and completed a gait analysis - essentially a precise breakdown of how a person walks - and determined there was a 100 percent match between the videos.

District Attorney Brent Cooper told Fox 17 he decided to "roll the dice" to see if the court would accept Nirenberg's report as proof.

The sheriff's department brought in Quinton Nance and told him he was busted because of the way he walked. Nance confessed, the department says, and gave up his two accomplices, Corey Fuqua and Jesse Armstead.

All three men are jailed on robbery charges and held in the Wayne County Jail on $500,000 bonds.

Photo by J.R. Lind, Patch staff