LEWISBURG -- A 22-year-old man, apprehended after being subdued by three femalel employees at a Dollar Tree near Lewisburg, told police he was robbing the store to get money for Christmas presents, officials said.

But he came up against the wrong store manager.

Confronted by a robber holding a knife that she said was "bigger than a steak knife," manager Vickey Shope, of Liverpool, thought to herself, "You're not doing this to me. You're not taking this money, and you're not leaving this store."

So she fought back, and with the help of another manager, Heidi Rothermel, wrestled the man to the floor and held him down until state police came. The robbery attempt occurred Friday night.

The man's lookout, according to a police document, was Jared Lee Mench, of Milton, who has been charged with robbery, among other offenses. In the police report, the alleged robber was identified as Ronald James Dean O'Grady, of Milton.

O'Grady has not been formally charged by police, but a check of court documents showed that he is on probation for a drug violation.

He met his match in Shope.

Shope, who had been working at the Dollar Tree store in Kelly Township, Union County, for only a month, described her ordeal Monday afternoon. "I was in the manager's office with Heidi Rothermel, who is a manager in training," she said. "It was the end of the day, after 10 p.m. when we close, and we were counting the day's receipts in the manager's office."

A third employee, Cathy Libby, of Milton, was vacuuming the store.

"We closed the store down," Shope said, "made sure the outdoor door was locked, because we were closed. This is normal procedure. We did our store sweep like we normally do. We did a store walk to make sure nobody was in the store and that it's safe to take down our tills and come in the office and count the deposit. Which is what we did."

However, Shope, Rothermel and Libby missed the suspect.

O'Grady was still in the store, hiding in the bathroom, officials said.

"Our door was shut," she said, "but it wasn't locked. It was usually locked. This night it was shut but you could come in the door. And that's what happened. He came in. Heidi and I were sitting inside, and the money was on a table. He said, 'Give me your money.'"

Then he grabbed the money, which totaled $603.

"He had a knife, and he showed it," Shope said. "Still, I said, 'You're not doing this to me,' pushed him up against the wall, tackled and struggled with him and that's how I got cut. When I pushed him up against the wall, the knife was knocked out of his hand under the desk in the office. Papers flew all over the office.

"I'm sure he was surprised at me, but he had a mask on, one of those hockey masks," Shope continued. "He tried to make a run for it. He started going out the door, and I yelled for Heidi. She grabbed the back of his sweat shirt, kept pulling and you could hear him gasping for air because she was starting to choke him with his sweat shirt. We kept struggling. I got knocked into the gum machines outside the office, and then I hit the side of the ice cream machine as we were taking him down."

Shope kept saying "You are not doing this to me."

And when he was on the ground, she said, "'Give me back my money.' I grabbed it from him, ran into the office, threw the money on the table, made sure the door was locked. Then I said a few choice words, which I can't repeat here, about how dumb I thought he was for robbing us. That's when the police arrived. They did their job."

In retrospect, Shope said her actions surprised her. A safe work environment is company policy, and in a situation such as this, workers are told to give the robber what he wants.

"But I just reacted" she said. "There were two thoughts running through my mind when it happened. I thought immediately, 'You are not robbing me.' And second, 'You are not leaving the store. You are going to get caught.' So he didn't leave with the money, and he got caught."

Shope said she was lucky. Normally, there aren't two managers working at closing time.

Still, "I'd do it again. Company said safety is always first, but I said he wasn't getting the money," she said.

Later that night Shope realized the suspect was a former employee, so he knew the nightly routine and where to hide in the store.

"He worked for us for about a year, up until two and a half weeks ago, when I had to let him go because he wasn't showing up for work," Shope said.

She said his mother called another employee at another store and said her son had robbed the store in order to provide a good Christmas for his kids.

"Well," Shope said, "why should he have ruined my Christmas with my family or Heidi's with hers, or anyone else involved? When I found out why he did this I thought, he could have had a nice Christmas had he shown up for work. He'd have had a job here. You know, I always told people I'd stand up for myself, and when the time came, I'm glad that's exactly what I did.