Restitution Plan Okayed In Resort Robbery Appeal

SNOW HILL - A former Ocean City hotel night auditor convicted of staging a phony armed robbery of the facility with the help of her then-boyfriend in the summer of 2007 successfully appealed her case in Circuit Court this week, having her conviction and sentence placed on the stet, or inactive docket, in exchange for an accelerated plan to repay nearly $50,000 in restitution.

Brady Ashley Greer, now 22, of Columbia, Md., was found guilty last February of felony theft, felony theft conspiracy and making a false statement to an officer for her role in the bogus armed robbery of the Stowaway Grand Hotel in Ocean City in August 2007 and was sentenced to five years in jail with all but one year suspended. She was also ordered at the time to pay over $49,000 in restitution to the hotel and an additional $9,000-plus to an insurance company in false workman's compensation claims filed by Greer related to the case.

Greer, through her attorneys, appealed the conviction and sentence and appeared for hearing on the case in Circuit Court on Wednesday. After reviewing the evidence presented, the judge agreed to place the charges against Greer on the stet, or inactive, docket, in exchange for accelerating the restitution plan, although the terms of agreement are not known.

The case goes back to August 6, 2007, when OCPD detectives responded to the Stowaway Grand for a reported armed robbery. Upon arrival, the detectives interviewed Greer, the hotel's night auditor, who claimed she had been forced to open the hotel's safe by a masked man who then tied her to a chair with duct tape before fleeing with nearly $50,000. Detectives began to question Greer's story when surveillance tapes of the area did not reveal a suspect, or any other evidence of her story.

The tapes did reveal Greer talking on her cell phone about 45 minutes prior to the reporting of the robbery and a check of Greer's phone records revealed she had been talking to her then-boyfriend, George M. Taylor, 23, of Stockton. At first, Greer told police Taylor was somewhere in Virginia on his way back from Florida, but a check of the phone records revealed Taylor he was in the Ocean City area just prior to the alleged crime.

Detectives were later able to put all the pieces together to determine Greer and Taylor staged the entire armed robbery, but didn't get a real break in the case until Taylor was arrested following a bizarre chase in the south end of Worcester County during which he briefly dragged a state trooper before a brief standoff with police. When presented the evidence, Taylor admitted he and Greer staged the phony robbery at the hotel and directed police to the money. Incidentally, Taylor is in the midst of a two-year jail term for his role in the crime.