Sep 14, 2026, 5:47 PM CT
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BARABOO, WI A Madison man was sentenced to 20 years prison for robbing a Baraboo business at gunpoint, a case investigators solved by tracing the getaway vehicle to an automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera that had photographed it on its way into town.
Dashun K. Williams, 31 of Madison was sentenced on Friday by Judge Blake Duren in Sauk County Court according a release from the Sauk County District Attorney's Office.
Williams was convicted of Armed Robbery as a serious violent crime repeater, a Class C felony that carried a mandatory minimum of five years in prison because of his prior armed robbery conviction. Judge Duren imposed 10 years of initial confinement followed by 10 years of extended supervision.
On February 27, 2025, Williams walked into the Cash Store on South Boulevard in Baraboo, waited until he was alone with two employees, and pulled a handgun. He told the manager to give him the money or he would kill her, forced both women to the back of the store, and had one lie face down while the other emptied the safe and the teller drawers.
He took about $4,600, ordered the employees into the bathroom, and warned that he would come back and kill them if they came out before he was gone. Both women said they believed they were going to die.
Williams had covered the getaway vehicle's license plate by the time he reached the store, and the Walmart security cameras nearby could not make it out. With no plate to run and no witnesses who saw the robber’s face because he wore a mask, the only break in the case came from a Sauk County Sheriff's Office dispatcher, who recognized a distinctive set of wheel rims from the surveillance images and matched them to an SUV that a highway camera had photographed traveling toward Baraboo from the Madison area earlier that morning, when the plate was still uncovered and legible.
That single lead identified the vehicle, a Jeep that traced to a co-defendant under GPS monitoring through the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, whose records placed it at the scene at the time of the robbery. Without it, the robbery would almost certainly have gone unsolved.
Sauk County District Attorney Michael X. Albrecht said “There is a real debate over ALPR cameras, and this case is a specific example that belongs in it. A dangerous man covered his plate, robbed two women at gunpoint, and walked away clean. He was identified only because a dispatcher recognized his vehicle from a camera that had photographed it on the way into town. This demonstrates local police and prosecutors doing exactly what the public asks of them, using a tool as it was intended, to protect the community from violent crime. It does not settle the debate. It adds a real example to it.”
Williams was previously convicted of armed robbery in Dane County in 2012 and was still under state supervision for that case when he robbed the Cash Store. His prior convictions also include theft from a financial institution, originally charged as a bank robbery.
The case was investigated by the Baraboo Police Department and the Sauk County Sheriff's Office, and prosecuted by Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Spoentgen.
