A Metro Nashville Police Department drone watched a robbery happen in real time on Monday and did more than just help officers converge on the suspects. After the arrests, the aircraft stayed on station long enough to locate the discarded weapon, a boxcutter hidden under a stack of pallets near the scene.
A Live Feed Turned A 911 Call Into A Flagrant Arrest
According to Metro Nashville police and Fox 17, live drone footage showed Antonio Crews holding a boxcutter while grabbing the victim’s shirt during the robbery on Robinson Road in Hermitage. Officers monitoring the feed moved in and arrested Crews along with Donavon Steele at the scene.
Police say the robbery involved $200 sent through CashApp and another $100 in cash, all of which was recovered and returned to the victim. Crews faces an aggravated robbery charge. Steele was charged with robbery for acting in concert, and both men were held on $25,000 bond.
The important detail is what happened after the takedown. The drone located the boxcutter hidden beneath pallets near the scene, recovering the physical evidence that turns a violent incident into a stronger aggravated robbery case. That is a different mission than simple pursuit footage. The aircraft documented the crime, guided the arrest, and helped secure the weapon afterward.
Nashville’s 45-Day Skydio Trial Keeps Producing Receipts
The case lands squarely inside Nashville’s 45-day drone-as-first-responder pilot, which DroneXL covered when the city launched the Skydio program in May. Three aircraft were placed on the Madison Precinct rooftop, with four FAA-certified officers flying them from the department’s Community Safety Center while dispatch data feeds directly into the operation.
The pilot was built with guardrails worth naming: no weapons on the drones, seven-day retention for most video, and public flight logs. Chief John Drake has said the drones can reach scenes within a minute or two, and local reporting has already shown the tempo building across shots-fired calls, crashes, and missing-person incidents.
Skydio’s hardware profile explains why this case fits the platform. The X10 line is built for standoff overwatch and evidence spotting, combining zoom capability, autonomy, and a domestic supply chain that police buyers increasingly care about. Nashville has become one of the clearest live demonstrations of where Skydio’s strengths actually matter: not flashy specs, but a chain from dispatch to airborne video to officer action.
DroneXL’s Take
This is what police agencies actually want when they pitch drone budgets: fewer blind arrivals, faster arrests, and cleaner evidence. Nashville just got all three in one call.
My Palm Springs story earlier this week showed what a DJI thermal platform can do when police deliberately avoid a street chase. This Nashville case shows Skydio scoring on a different field: live overwatch, guided arrest, and post-arrest evidence recovery. Same category of mission, different manufacturer strength.
The bigger question remains political, not technical. Nashville’s pilot still has to survive city oversight after the trial ends. Cases like this are the kind of hard numbers departments bring into those meetings because they collapse the argument into something simple: two suspects arrested, victim’s money recovered, weapon recovered, and officers never had to search blindly around pallets hoping to get lucky.
Sources: Fox 17 Nashville, DroneXL, DroneXL, WKRN, DroneXL
