Three armed and masked men entered the lobby of a hotel on Seymour’s east side at about 2:30 a.m. Thursday and demanded the clerk open the safe or they would shoot her.

When the front desk night clerk at Knights Inn at 207 N. Sandy Creek said she couldn’t get into the safe, one of the men jumped over the counter.

That man took the cash drawer out of the register and emptied it while the other two men pointed their guns at the face of the woman, according to the clerk’s 911 call to the Seymour Police Department.

After removing an undisclosed amount of cash from the drawer, the man threw it at the woman, and the three left through the front door, leaving behind a $50 bill on the floor and warning the clerk to not move or they would kill her.

The woman then called 911 to report the robbery and that the men had left in a truck, but she didn’t know what kind.

She told dispatchers that the men, who were wearing gloves, had not touched or hurt her.

The woman also told dispatchers she thought the men were joking.

“She didn’t think their guns were real,” Police Chief Bill Abbott said. “She said they came into the lobby pretty quickly, surprising her.”

Officials with Knights Inn declined to discuss the incident.

While investigating the robbery at Knights Inn, Seymour officers overheard radio traffic that the Ricker’s convenience store at 3545 W. County Road 450S in Bartholomew County had been robbed, Abbott said.

Crime spree timeline:

• Midnight Wednesday: Three armed men carjacked a white Hummer H2 at the Speedway convenience store in Clermont on the west side of Indianapolis.
• 2:30 a.m. Thursday: Three armed men hold up a hotel clerk at the Knights Inn hotel at 207 N. Sandy Creek Drive in Seymour.
• 3 a.m. Thursday: Three armed men hold up a Ricker’s gas station at 3545 W. County Road 450S, Columbus, in Bartholomew County.
• A few minutes later, Trooper Korry Clark spots a white Hummer H2 in the area of State Road 46 and Interstate 65, and a chase reaching speeds of 100 mph goes through Bartholomew and Johnson counties.
• 3:51 a.m. Thursday: The person driving the white Hummer H2 crashes near an apartment complex at Stop 12 and Madison Avenue at the southern tip of Indianapolis.

Those investigating the robbery include Sgt. Michael Cooper, Cpl. Devin Cornwell and officers Jim Handley, Ryan Cherry, Devlin McMindes and Ben Miller. Officer Crystal Schapson was the on-call detective who initially investigated the robbery.

[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Who to call” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]

If you have any information about Thursday morning’s robbery of The Knight’s Inn at 207 N. Sandy Brook Drive in Seymour, call Seymour Police Department at 812-522-1234.

[sc:pullout-text-end]