The owner of a small Dayton’s Bluff market said he was mystified by why police took more than two hours to respond to a violent robbery Monday at his store.

“I don’t know why it took them so long,” owner Bandar Thamer said Wednesday.

On Monday, four men entered Walk-In Grocery at 841 E. Seventh St., beat and pistol-whipped an employee and a friend of the employee, and made off with cash, cigarettes and the victims’ cellphones.

According to police records, a 911 call about the incident was placed at 2:54 p.m. Nobody investigated until Thamer — who was standing in the street waving his hands — flagged down an officer who was driving to another call at 5:26 p.m.

Police officials noted that the 911 call came roughly an hour after the time the owner said the robbery occurred, and also that he declined an ambulance. Thus, county dispatchers gave it a low priority — particularly because multiple “active” incidents were taking place in the area at the time.

Thamer said he asked his employee — who had been kicked in the face and struck four times in the back of the head with the butt of a handgun — whether he wanted an ambulance. The employee, whose head was bleeding, declined.

“They wanted to wait here to describe to police what happened,” Thamer said. “He was surprised. He asked me, ‘Why’d they take three hours?’ ”

Thamer said initially he wanted to complain about the police response time but later in the day changed his mind, noting he was worried the publicity would affect his business.

He said his employee didn’t call 911 immediately because he didn’t speak English well. Instead, the employee called Thamer, who was driving into work at the time. Thamer said he called police as soon as he arrived at the store and saw the disarray.

It was the first time he’s called police since he bought the store about nine months ago, he said.

St. Paul police spokesman Steve Linders said, “We’re aware of the time it took to respond to the call, and we are looking into the matter with our partners at the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center.

“Our goal is to serve the people of St. Paul in a timely manner and we are taking steps to ensure … that these types of delays are anomalies,” Linders added. “Being assaulted and robbed at gunpoint is frightening and concerning. It’s extremely unfortunate that the victims had to wait so long to speak with officers, and we’re working to find out why this happened.”

Allison Winters, a spokeswoman for Ramsey County, which manages the dispatch center, said, “The Emergency Communication Center is currently reviewing the call with police to identify ways to improve protocol in these situations.”

Linders said that when Thamer called 911, police had “active and in-progress calls” in the city’s Eastern District for a theft in progress, a suicide attempt in progress, an alarm call and a call of an emotionally disturbed person.

Roughly an hour later, at 3:45 p.m., 17 squad cars were called to a confirmed shooting, which turned out to be nonfatal, in the 1800 block of East Seventh Street. Officers had to hold residents in two different apartment buildings and execute search warrants.

Then a weapons call at Arlington Recreation Center required four additional squads from the Eastern District as well as multiple cars from another district.

The officer that Thamer flagged down was en route to the shooting investigation, Linders said.

The four suspects in the robbery, who remained at large Wednesday, were all black males in their mid- to late 20s, and three of them wore white T-shirts, Thamer said. They ran off and got into a nearby Dodge Journey SUV and another car and drove away.

Thamer said the men appeared organized during the robbery, with one man targeting each victim in the store and another looking for surveillance footage, which the robbers also stole.

“They know what they’re doing — they made a plan before. Everybody had a job to do,” Thamer said.