The man approached a clerk at a convenience store after spending 40 minutes in their bathroom.
"He stuck his hand under his shirt and said, `This is a robbery. I got a gun,'" Shreveport police Detective Russell Ross said.
The clerk told the man she knew it wasn't a gun, sparking a brief argument before the man went around the counter, Ross said.
"They scuffled. And during the scuffle, she felt something sharp poke her," he said. "She reached over and grabbed a baseball bat she had behind the counter and started waling on him when she realized what he had under his shirt was a fork ... which was no match for a baseball bat."
The clerk chased him out of the store and continued to hit him with the bat.
"A customer saw what was going on, took a pistol from his vehicle, came over and fired his pistol into the ground," Ross said.
Then, both the fork and the bat were dropped, Ross said.
Derrick Dwayne Franklin, 24, address unknown, was booked at Shreveport City Jail on one count of attempted armed robbery.